had a great time at a concert for haiti up at harlemstage last weekend. came to see emeline michel and dj jephte guillaume, the latter of whom holds the distinction of producing the single most expensive song i've ever purchased (Blue and Deep, $3.99 on Traxsource).

i'm a slave to a good beat.



the vibe at 134th and amsterdam was infectious. haitians collectively remind me of my crazy aunty (don't we all have one?) -- loud, gregarious, maybe even obnoxious, if she weren't so much fun to be around.

ran into miss bruno sisters marjory and shirley, repping ayiti as fashionably as ever. so good to catch up with them. shirley said she's starting the master's filmmaking program at london film school in the fall. so good to hear, since it's one of the schools i'll be applying to now that i've decided i'm never (ever ever) going back to nyu, but would still like a degree.

so sad to hear that they are discontinuing their clothing line and focusing on art installation pieces (will be exhibiting in s.africa late fall), using the ubiquitous immigrant bag as a canvas. i'm sure it will be brilliant, although i'm still a little disappointed that i never got my so-called scarf while they were still making them.

Wunmi and her band are performing at Harlem Stage tonight with KUKU and DJ Spinna.

Brooklynites, Londoners and Naijas claim her as their own. I know her from sabar class where, at forty-something-years-old, she regularly mops the floor with the rest of us. I've actually never met a woman with more raw energy and talent.

Heard she's raising money to shoot a vid in Ghana, which might explain the twenty dollar cover. She's worth it.

Been back from Johannesburg for a couple of days trying to ease back into things slowly, though next week's film school orientation will likely upset my natural equilibrium. I hate coming back from vacation.

This morning I took a jog around Brooklyn Tech track a block from my apartment. As long as I didn't talk to too many folks, I could pretend that I was still on the continent surrounded by South Africans.

There was an older, stocky sista walking on the track in a black, ankle-length skirt. She wore headphones and kept raising her hands in the air and clapping as she shouted some indecipherable phrase to the heavens. Must be listening to gospel music, I thought, thanking God for another day. She was not unlike any of the women I saw at my friend's wedding ceremony, shouting and waving their hands in the air, clapping and stamping their feet rhythmically. The only real differences were language and zip code.

Crossing the 300-meter mark, I noticed that someone had cut a jagged, human-sized hole through a new chain link fence they had built last month. The fence was supposed to separate the track -- property of the prestigious Brooklyn Tech High School, down the road -- from the surrounding low-income housing buildings in Fort Greene.

Every time someone succeeded in bending back the metal, to make a way inside when the fence was locked after hours, they built a taller, stronger fence to replace the damaged one. Again, some clever young'un would rip a hole through it, so they would build another new fence. It was pointless and inevitable, but it didn't stop the powers that be from building bigger fences.

I looked up and saw a sheet hanging out of one of the project windows, like off some rooftop in the Ninth Ward. Humph. It's funny how, despite all our differences, black folks from Soweto to Brooklyn are really the same -- praying and waiting for deliverance. Trying to break free from physical, emotional, and mental ghettos while the rest of the world is hellbent on building bigger fences.

Maybe I never left Brooklyn after all. When I was in Soweto, some places reminded me of my own neighborhood. People on top of people on top of people and all black. Some places in Soweto are even becoming gentrified, so expensive that well off blacks can't afford houses there, not that that means whites are moving in.

I think things will flow to a natural order as long as folks who leave the ghetto never forget that our liberation is bound up with those still living in it. To forget that is to forget our communities and lose ourselves.