signing off | september 23, 2009

signing off | september 23, 2009

i leave for my writers residency soon. i feel excited and anxious and exhilarated all at the same time. keep reading the welcome letter over and over again: "The absence of distractions forces many women to face themselves as writers for the first time." i am so looking forward to it.

in honor, i am signing off of my blog, coming back in a month. there are a number of things i might discuss before going, like caster semenya, healthcare reform, or bronx princess, but it doesn't really matter -- i'm letting it go.

be well and read wisely. :)

Read more »

uwem akpan | september 24, 2009

uwem akpan | september 24, 2009

my sis hipped me to this today...oprah selected "say you're one of them," a short story by Uwem Akpan, for her latest book club selection. i am speechless. not only is he naija, but an akwa ibomite from ikot ekpene. (in case there is any confusion about my pride, my father's village is ifa ikot idang and my mother's mbak etoi. akwa ibom isong-oooo!)

his bio says he started writing fiction at night during seminary, then went on to earn an mfa in writing from UMich. what do you call a jesuit priest with a master's in fiction writing? a nigerian. :)

perhaps if oprah and her legion followers have room in their hearts for uwem then there might be some more for me. i leave tomorrow for my writer's residency. nearly hyperventilated over a bin of travel toothpaste today at Target (couldn't decide which one i wanted). i don't know how to pack. taking deep breaths...

Read more »

brown art | september 19, 2009

brown art | september 19, 2009

was it DuBois who wrote about black art, some decades ago, as the world gaping at a dog walking on its hind legs? (this is from memory, so don't quote me here.) i find that the world hasn't changed all that much.

started my new job this week as marketing manager at a theater company, Culture Project, currently producing a spoken word memoir/play by Lemon Andersen, a former Def Poet. he grew up in Brooklyn, raised by heroin addicts, and started selling drugs until he landed in Sing Sing. if that wasn't enough, he started dealing again after he got out and landed in a Texas prison.

reading and poetry turned Lemon's life around. he got on Def Poetry Jam, then Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, then got a role in Inside Man, and most recently The Soloist. it's an amazing and inspirational story -- the play and the performance are truly brilliant. but i can't shake that feeling that the audience is simply gaping, trying to find some lost part of their own humanity, to purge some irreconcilable guilt over having lived a more gilded life.

given the performance and vernacular, his Latino heritage, coming from the inner-city, one might certainly call it brown art. and for all its brilliance, i have become so tired of the powers ghettoizing brown art and then slinging it for profit. the truer Lemon stays to his voice, the more others seek to capitalize on it. and i worry that i have suddenly become one of them.

i suppose inherent in the worry is the consolation that i am aware of this pitfall. or perhaps it is only that i too have many stories to share and have always shied away from the types of people who would exploit me.

it will become increasingly more difficult for me to live this artistic life in public. i would not like to have to stop blogging, or start being less honest. good thing not too many people read this -- i don't have much tolerance for gapers.

Read more »

nine eleven | september 12, 2009

nine eleven | september 12, 2009

I must have watched five hours of 9/11 coverage on the History Channel yesterday, into the wee hours of the morning. When the towers fell, eight years ago, I was on leave from Stanford, in my Intro to African-American History class at Spelman College. I think class started at 9am because, on his way in, Professor Cobb announced that the World Trade Center was under attack and pushed a television up to the front of the room.

We watched the second tower get hit and then he gave a lecture on the Arab-Israeli conflict, certain that these were acts of terrorism. Some of it I remembered from global studies in high school, but it was all somewhat foreign and surreal given the circumstances.

I was somewhat detached and in my head about the carnage of that day. I had spent the summer in Accra, doing plant research at the University of Ghana-Legon, training with an amateur dance troupe, and suffering from -- what I now know as -- a severe bout of malaria drug-induced depression.

My emotions were fairly blunted, and I don't really remember feeling all that sad. Probably why I watched so obsessively yesterday, and felt like I was seeing it all for the first time.

Having now lived in New York for five years, I finally made it in to St. Paul's Chapel, across the street from Ground Zero, last weekend. I looked at all the photos and memorials, watched a few video tributes, then sat down to say a prayer. It's hard to really fathom how many people died in the planes, in the towers, in the Marriott Hotel down below.

I have come to appreciate our uniquely myopic view of ourselves as the center of the world. Our faith in the subways and skyscrapers and cranes, whose failure or sabotage can fell thousands upon thousands of people. I salute those of us who keep the faith. I salute those who died, those who helped clean up, those of us who ensure the security of an unwieldy mass of people, and those of us who defend our civil liberties against political tyranny. I also salute those who foresaw, in our governmental restructuring after 9/11, the impending failure to respond to natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. And finally, I salute the Hurricane Katrina victims, responders, and survivors.

If you could write a moment of silence in a blog, this would be it...

Read more »

the poet within

the poet within

Back in the day when I used to hang out on MySpace, one of the single most defining criteria for accepting a would-be friend's request was whether or not their page was littered with bad poems. I am not a poet -- but I am a writer and a perfectionist and a snob when it comes to poetry.

The first written work I ever published, at 14, was a poem about slavery in an anthology of student poetry. (I still have it, but won't subject you to it here, lol.) It gave me somewhat unrealistic ideas about how easy it is to publish and, because I wrote it in a couple of hours, how easy it is to write poetry. Since then, apart from another poem -- about what I can only loosely describe as black liberation as confounded by the profit motive -- that I wrote and delivered at Stanford Black Graduation 2003, I have never published another word of poetry and probably never will.

Since becoming a writer, I have realized how incredibly hard it is to write good poetry. Most poetry I read/hear in passing is too literal, overwrought, and littered with cliches to be any good. I can only guess that most of these poets would probably not call themselves writers, when in fact more discipline is required of the poet than the (fiction or nonfiction) writer.

Novelists might write in four pages what a poet must convey in four words. At heart, I'm not really a poet. I prefer not to distill the meaning out of things, but rather to write on and on (though brevity in any writing is still the goal), evoking something in the reader who will distill her own meaning. Sometimes a few words will strike me that convey something so large that I am inspired to write them down and hope to turn them into a poem someday. It doesn't happen often, but I listen when it does.

I do know some really great poets, and, interestingly enough, most of them don't really call themselves that. They are complicated, multi-faceted, deeply thoughtful people who are usually so busy working out their own shit through words that they don't stop to realize it's coming out as the most magnificent poetry. I'm sure, much to our collective loss, most of their poetry rests in a journal lying haphazardly at the bottom of their closet.

All of this being said, I do think that there's a poet somewhere within all of us. Even in the groundskeeper at the Botanical Gardens who, after giving me a ride over to the Rockefeller rose garden, turned to me and said, "A rose, to many roses."

I live for these unexpected moments of brilliance.

Read more »