i am heading to akwa ibom tomorrow for a few days. have been dragging my feet like a petulant child, only because i have a difficult time tearing myself away from the lagos-style enjoyment of life. while there i will not be conducting any further interviews toward my memoir project, elizabeth's daughter, although i have spent the past few days putting together quite a bit of writing from the past year.

i'm pleased with how it's progressing, and should be able to publish a few essays very soon and at least start the ball rolling with a publisher (wish me luck). tho it might take several years, i'm certain the linked essay approach is my best bet at moving steadily toward the goal. will workshop some of them here, if i feel so inclined.

heard tons of wonderful songs and poetry at bogobiri open mic yesterday, namely from the ever fabulous wana udobang. found myself wanting to share something, sang a couple of songs, but it would have been great to do a reading, too. in light of this, i felt compelled to repost a poem i wrote awhile back in response to seeing an old picture of my mother. enjoy. --AL.

mother

on a hot day in
february 1964
a white buick waits on a
winding, dusty road
somewhere in akwa ibom

the parched shrubs and
sun-bleached road
communing their boredom, waiting
for your girlfriends to
get inside the car

while two, stylish young men in the front seat
rev the engine and
tune the radio to high life

there is another girl
clad in a white polka dot tank top
who has just handed off her camera and is
cutting a line back toward the car

(and a moment after this picture is taken she will turn and shout
"but i told you to wait!"
giggling)

there is another girl, no more than twenty
standing behind the car
smiling
whom i cannot see so clearly

i think it is you, but
she appears like a
ghost--
a lone head with a jet black afro
floating
and the same
cheekbones
gap-toothed smile
and
dark amber-colored irises
that are my own

perhaps it is my own image, like a
phantom
reflected off the shiny Kodak paper;
your face,
burnished by the hot sun to a
deep bronze, and
your teeth shining bright

years after your father died, but
still before the war
you are all joy
and
eternal hope

and
i wonder whether
if i could have met you then
as a young woman
whether we might have been
friends

(on the back of the photo you wrote:
Veronica, Alicia and their friends.
They took me on an evening ride in their mother's car)

had a wonderful time at the abuja writers forum event last night with performance poet Ikeogu Oke. yesterday's evening began with the national anthem and a song by guitarist PJ, with an art interlude by university of uyo-trained painter millicent osumo. oke read (and sang, quite surprisingly) from his volume of poetry, salutes without guns, selected one of the 2010 books of the year by the times literary supplement.

i found him to be a passionate artist moved by love, light and music. in response to a question posed by an audience member, about why nigerian poets seem so angry, he said something that so resonated with me that i've decided to post it (in near entirety) here. please enjoy and share as you wish. and do visit abuja writers forum online and on facebook to find out more about the guest writers series and weekly critique sessions for budding writers. --AL.

"A work of poetry, of literature, is first of all a work of beauty. You can be angry, but you have to be angry in a beautiful way. The problem is that [Nigerian] poets tend to be more skilled in expressing anger than expressing beauty. [Ideally] you read a poem and you see the anger, and you don't feel the anger; beauty is something that strikes you, anger does not. The anger has to be handled constructively so that what emerges is not a work of anger but a work of beauty. Fine if they are angry, they should be angry, but they should not inflict us with works that are not beautiful.

I think love is one of the best emotions that we can produce. Some of my love poems are the best I've ever written. But you can't write about love if you're not a lover. If your love is sincere; write about that love. If your anger is sincere; write about that anger. But don't ever forget that you're writing to create a work of beauty that will survive the anger. Love and anger are ephemeral emotions, but beauty is something that lasts forever." -- Poet Ikeogu Oke, Author of Salutes Without Guns

i've reached that point at my current job when i begin seeking sanity, pondering what's next, and prepping my exit strategy. i must must must refocus on my novel.

i don't want to look back, in ten years, and wonder where the time went.

attended a wonderful reading at bowery poetry cafe last night, one of my hedgebrook sisters--and co-writers--published in an upcoming issue of the naugatuck river review. reminded me of what really matters. seems i've gotten all caught up in the 9-to-5. (it happens.)

my friend's poems were my favorite. i think it's hard to write about the personal in a way that transcends whiny narcissism to universal humanity. she is exceedingly good at it. i found most of the others weren't. one girl actually wrote a poem in which she described, at length, the shaving of her legs.

i have never been more unmoved.

at any rate, much fodder for writing this week. looking forward to setting pen to paper again.

in a stack of
black and white photographs
i search for your face

on a hot day in
february 1964
when a white buick waits on a
winding, dusty road
somewhere in akwa ibom

the parched shrubs and
sun-bleached road
communing their boredom, waiting
for your girlfriends to
get inside the car

while two, stylish young men in the front seat
rev the engine and
tune the radio to high life

there is another girl
clad in a white polka dot tank top
who has just handed off her camera and is
cutting a line back toward the car

(a moment after this picture is taken she will turn and shout
"but i told you to wait!"
and they will have to snap another one)

there is another girl, no more than twenty
standing behind the car
smiling
whom i cannot see so clearly

i think it is you, but
she appears like a
ghost--
a lone head with a jet black afro
floating
and the same
cheekbones
gap-toothed smile
and
dark amber-colored irises
that are my own

perhaps it is my own image, like a
phantom
reflected off the shiny Kodak paper;
your face,
burnished by the hot sun to a
deep bronze, and
your teeth shining bright

years after your father died, but
still before the war
you are all joy
and
eternal hope

(on the back of the photo you wrote:
Veronica, Alicia and their friends.
They took me on an evening ride in their mother's car)

you are welcome
to my kingdom     my city    my self
but yr presence must not disturb these inhabitants
leave nothing out of place/ push no dust under my
  rugs
leave not a crack in my wine glasses
no finger prints
clean up after yrself in the bathroom
there are no maids here    no days off
for healing    no insurance policies
for dislocation of the psyche
aliens/ foreigners/ are granted resident status
we give them a little green card
as they prove themselves non-injurious
to the joy of my nation
i sustain no intrusions/ no double-entendre romance
no soliciting of sadness    in my life
are those who love me well
the rest are denied their visas...
is everyone ready to boogie

-- from Ntozake Shange's spell #7: geechee jibara quik magic trance manual for technologically stressed third world people (1979)

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.

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.