Today at work was so blessed to meet Ellen Schneider of Active Voice, formerly of PBS's POV, one of a handful of activists invited to a private White House briefing on the impact of grassroots arts, environmental, and social justice activism on US economic recovery.

First off, I don't know why there has been such paltry coverage of this meeting.

Secondly, I don't know why arts activists don't get out the vote better on their issues. If I were Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (also in attendance), of Urban Bush Women, I would have issued a press release around this briefing and some kind of "recommendation" to the Obama administration.

Lastly, I sincerely hope something substantive comes of this -- beyond a poetry jam @ Chez Obama, Michelle's recent meeting with arts leaders at the American Ballet, and the administration's 4% increase to the National Endowment of the Arts' budget, still a paltry sum.

Artists will continue to labor in poverty and obscurity, but I certainly hope the powers that be finally give them their due. I think artists can change the world.

May 26, 2009
After Katiti King's jazz class @ DNA on Saturday, I went to the DanceAfrica Festival @ Brooklyn Academy of Music. I got to dance in the street and see some folks I haven't laid eyes on since moving to the Bronx. Ronald K. Brown/Evidence performed this year (pictured above).

I've been a festival regular since before I moved to NYC, taking a bus in just to spend the day bargaining with street vendors. Six years later it can feel a bit like same shit different day, although my girl Lady Black's sister, a painter, had this amazing portable art -- suitcases and briefcases that she covered in images of Africa and afro-ed sistas. I really should have copped one, definitely something I'd never seen before. I came correct, though -- bought some raw shea butter, a leopard-print clutch, agate ring, and green-and-white-striped bangle. Now accessorized, I am so ready for the IAFF.

Spent Memorial Day at home writing. Bliss. :)

May 25, 2009


Hot. Off. The. Presses. The Pew Research Center found that the 2008 Presidential election was the most racially diverse in history.

Black women had the highest voter turnout race of any group.

Officially. I thank God I was born a black woman -- we represent. :)

One of my coworkers, a 62-years-young sista from Jersey, is keeping me hip. She buys a book @ Hue-Man Bookstore in Harlem almost every week -- calls it "paying rent" -- and gets to hear a remarkable list of authors tell it in their own words. This week, Barbara Seals Nevergold and Peggy Brooks-Bertram on Go, Tell Michelle: African American Women Write to the New First Lady. They sent out an online call for letters to the First Lady, and decided to publish them in a book. I copped one and was promptly brought to tears reading a letter by poet/writer Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie, titled My Great-Great-Grandmother Talks to Michelle Obama:

     "Don't ever tell somebody they ain't got ta call you by your title, Baby. You humble, I know. Your beginnins is like so many women's and you wanna stay grounded and all that. Mmmhmmm. I understand and I think that's real good a you, but I'm a tell you something: you ain't just you. Nah-uh. You alla us. You you, sure. Daughter of Fraser Robinson and Marion Shields Robinson. Harvard and Princeton graduate. And you sho' do make us right proud. But you know, you dat woman with bleedin' hands workin' double shifts in the factory, and dat Mama ain't seen her kids since the drugs got hol' of her and messed up her mind...So when they call you First Lady you think about me and all them women ain't getting a sliver of light. You turn right nice and you answer. Baby, you answer for each and every one of us 'cause for the first time in the history of this here country we gonna be called by our true name."

A week after my last post, I started a new job at a documentary film company working on a film series about immigration policy. Since 2001, the filmmakers have shot over 1400 hours of behind-the-scenes footage in Washington DC as a concerned, bi-partisan group of Senators, staffers, lobbyists, and advocates tried to push through Comprehensive Immigration Reform. By the end of the series, called My American Dream: How Democracy Works Now, movement toward an overhaul of the nation's immigration system has been soundly thwarted by 9/11 and the overwhelmingly anti-immigrant sentiment left in its wake.

It's a great gig, allowing me to concretize my filmmaking in a way that film school didn't, while also paying the bills. But new jobs always have a way of destabilizing everything else in your life. The first couple of weeks I was sleeping six hours a night so that I could get up early and write from 4-7AM (which turned into 5-7:30AM, then 6-7:30AM and an hour stolen on the subway ride to work), but I felt like such a zombie. So last week I let myself sleep in most of the week and haven't spent time with my characters in over a week now. At the moment, I'm deep in the throes of major writer's guilt.

I'm so blessed for the opportunity, don't get me wrong, but I mos def need to have a draft of my book done in the next couple of months. I have my Hedgebrook residency coming up in October and I've finally decided to go back to film school in the fall (the job is a six-month gig), so I have a bunch of things pulling me in about ten different directions.

So what I really want to impart today is the importance of staying focused on your goals. No matter what jobs, friends, or lovers come and go, you will always be left with yourself and what you're striving for in the world. If you concede those goals to your job, friends, or lovers, you will never reach them. But if you remain stubborn, tenacious, and ambitious, doing whatever it takes to get there, then you will. Even I, who dares to write and finds much less time even to blog, will get there if I keep pushing. I can sleep when the book is done. I can dance then too. And I hope that this is the last time I have to work for anyone other than myself.

By the way, I am finally finishing up Dreams from my Father. After devouring the first 300 pages in a few days, I have been savoring the last hundred or so pages, like slow sipping an aged wine, for the past month. I suppose I just like Barack in Kenya, identify with that same shift in consciousness that hits me each time I return to Nigeria. Brilliant writer, that man is.