My friend invited me to a reception for Black Renaissance, the journal of NYU's Institute of Africana Studies. At the reception, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed and Angela Jackson read from selected works to an audience of activists, academics, and public intellectuals, among them Africana Studies chair Manthia Diawara.

I walked in and almost turned right back around because the scene reminded me of AAAS lectures at Stanford (referring to the Department of African and African-American Studies, the first of its kind in history). Bunch of brown people holed up in some room with no windows, pale walls, and those fluorescent lights that make everything look ugly, talking about slavery, revolution, and WEB Du Bois. I, for one, had had my fill by graduation.

But I sat down, nevertheless, and began listening to the poetry.



It was quite good, though the problem with great poets is that people stop critiquing them and just let the words run over them like a wash.

That seemed to be happening during the Q&A, when folk were asking the most benign questions I have ever heard about the state of Black writing, street and chick lit, etc. So I stood up and said that I personally know a great deal of black writers doing interesting and dynamic work right now, and feel that I'm part of an imminent Brooklyn Renaissance of black art. I said it was all well and good for us to reference Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin and the like, but we need to craft a new discourse for addressing the issues of today.

Amiri responded by saying I needed to know my history. He proceeded to recount various details of slavery, Civil Rights, and the Black Arts movement, but I stopped listening when I realized he thought I didn't know who or what I was talking about and just wanted to make up some new shit that was really tight.

Then it was on.

I have never argued with a literary great, but his presumptuousness was enough to get me going. I responded that I had been in school almost my entire life. That I had read all these peoples works, studied them, referenced them, trying to find my way in the literary world. But that I'm dealing with having to create a new way of languaging our people to make it relevant to folks living now.

That it's all well and good and necessary for these Harlem Renaissance greats to have contributed what they did, but I can't emulate them and create a book that exists in some historical time capsule. "But it's not about a time capsule!" he countered. Went off on some other stuff about how we need to self-publish, never really answered my question or even really listened to what I was trying to say.

I don't know if you feel me, but we're living in an era of globalization, HIV/AIDS, the Jena 6, genocide, and Katrina. The reality is that Zora Neale Hurston died a penniless maid, and I can go the way of Zora, along with black people as a whole, if I think of writing as an exercise in historical reverence. I'm trying to figure out how to language these issues so they become relevant to folks my age and also mobilize the powers that be to action.

I can read Du Bois, but he can't teach me how to do that. In fact, he moved to Ghana to escape the West and, yes, I have visited his grave. I don't want to believe that the best black writing happened sixty years ago -- I want to believe that it lies somewhere in the future when we can tell our own stories, make them relevant, remove them from the margins, and place them squarely at the center of humanity.

Maybe I'm not being clear. Yes, we need Nkrumah, Fanon, Okri, all these and more, but they will not bring us any closer than we already are to answering these age-old questions. We need a new book, a new language.

Maybe that's why Barack looks so sexy to young folks...

Last night I checked out a show in the West Village with one of my homegirls from NYU. We had received an e-mail from Keith Davis, a third year film student, about a play, Hoodoo Love, showing at the Cherry Lane Theater. It's written by Katori Hall, an up-and-coming black playwright and performer who is a Columbia and Harvard theatre grad. I was complaining on my way there about how tired I was, but when the house went black and the stage lights came up, I was transported to 1933 Memphis Tennessee, caught up in the story of Toulou and her sometimes Blues man the Ace of Spades (pictured above).

In the play, the aged Candy Lady, Toulou's sage and witty neighbor, provides a hoodoo potion to keep Ace, a traveling blues man and womanizer, in Toulou's bed for good. Meanwhile, Toulou's brother Jib, a self-righteous preacher, pays a visit and dredges up painful family history of incest, rape, and betrayal. I'm not gonna spoil the ending for y'all. All I'm gonna say is that Hall is a brilliant playwright, and performances by Keith (Jib), Angela Lewis (Toulou), Marjorie Johnson (Candy Lady), and Kevin Mambo (Ace of Spades) are some of the best I've ever seen on a stage.

I'm being too modest. I enjoyed this play more than I have any other in my life. Partly, it was because it's written by a sistah and the writing is so damn good. The other part is because I've SO been there, knowing that it would take some serious hoodoo, voodoo, or juju to keep a "sometimes man" in my life. I must have yelled out, "Tell the truth!" about ten times during the whole show.

And that's the thing about black art -- the call and response. The audience was as much a part of the performance as the actual actors were. We helped to validate and give life to the story being told. I almost felt like, when we walked out into the lobby after the show, we would meet Toulou herself.

But what we encountered after the show was so much better than that; each and every actor left the performance onstage and brought their real selves to meet the audience -- as humble, grateful, and talented human beings. Even Hall, who has been showered with critical acclaim, was as approachable as if she were sitting on a stoop in Memphis.

I almost never do this, but I'm telling you guys to go see this play. The room wasn't nearly as packed as it should have been and you don't get many chances to see black women playwrights at the top of their game. If you can, pick a Tuesday show after which the actors, director, and writer hold a Q&A session with patrons.