Bessie Head

The late Bessie Head is one of Africa's most renowned writers.  I just finished reading her novel Maru.  The reading of the novel and what I know of her life inspired this poem.

You walked from there from the brink
from that place of apartheid
to hope for the quiet life
to escape the hell of the tragic life.
My heroine writer and spiritual mom.
One weekend I may have walked on 
the same soil and dust that you
moved upon as an exile with tired feet.
Like you I am an exile from centuries past
and like you I write to find my soul.
The brutality you lived under more blatant
in your face than the far more subtle
riddled one of denial I reside under here.
A quiet Pan-Africanism within you.
The mix breed girl of a white woman
and black stable hand early thrown
away displaced from the black and
mostly certainly the white.
I can see the horrors of that time
even though I was not there.
As an Diaspora African woman
and in a place that without words
forbids me to think, my mind still
treads all the horrors of the oppressed
anywhere. You wrote in Botswana 
to save yourself. Your small novels
of power and a pinch of poetics
are snapshots and paintings of 
the humanity of men and women.
It is all of them, us, and you 
universal pain and longing 
the displacement.  In your quiet room
the lamp on after dusk with pain 
and passion in your soul you peered out
the window at Serowe your adopted 
village and wrote of yourself and outside
yourself.  In Botswana they praised
you to me six years after your death.
To have sat with you sipping a cup 
of tea. To have sat at your feet to learn
the craft of writing the winds and pangs
of beauty and hurt in a land I am parted from.

decisions

too black
too ugly

too fat 
too ugly

too poor
too ugly

you sit on your toad stool
or your rotting throne
dictating, signing
physical and psychological
death warrants for millions

who are you to judge?
who are you to decide?

Gone

When
I look
at this
world
with its'
crusaders
and 
masqueraders 
I become
like my
slave 
ancestors,
waiting 
towards
the sky.

Swing
low 
sweet 
chariot.
 

Why?

Why
do you allow them to humiliate you?
Why
do you allow them to paint their rags on you?
Why
do you beg for crumbs from the slave master's table?
Why
do you allow them to define who you are?
Why
are you so enamored with the one who holds a knife to your throat?
Why 
do you allow them to convince you what reality is?
Why 
are you happy to kneel in the golden chains they put on you?
Why
do you allow them to tell you what truth and beauty is?
Why
do you allow a stranger to write your own history for you?
Why
you put on their ill-fitting masks or any mask at all?
Why
do you allow them to define where the location of your kingdom is?
Why
do you allow them to tell you whom to love?
Why
do you allow them to calibrate your self worth?
Why 
won't you be whole, real men and women again reclaiming
your true essence and walk past this plastic existence?

The Most Beautiful Day In the World

The world was heading for a bloodbath on the most beautiful day in the world.
The coffins were being lined up in the stillness and brilliance of the sun.
The birds sang their eternal and usual symphony of song.

My love and I stood in the countryside, he with the sad and beautiful eyes,
and he confessed he loved me.  Worry lines on both sides of his lips,
tiny rivulets beginning to flow through his hair though youth
still resided in him.  The rivulets had flowed forth
when he was a infant.  
Great wisdom 
and sadness there.

I hid behind a tree trunk and laughed, and he peeked around to see me.
And that day, beautiful day, the world was heading for a bloodbath
in a tiny spot on a map which few knew of or could pronounce,
which schools failed to teach about in its' sterile, pale, patriotic doctrine.
 

Observation

Everyday we walk through 
this minefield of optical
illusions. Can an elephant
become a tiny harmless
fish?  Can a piranha become
a kitten?  They tell us one
thing, expect us to to see it,
and it's not really there.  But
the dancers and eternal teens
keep believing because the
visual and emotional pillagers,
the clowns with all kinds of
cheap, vulgar bells and 
whistles dressed in gaudy
clothes pontificate what is
truth. Pontius Pilate 
asked on that distant day
what is truth?  Yes, they keep
believing here despite nothing
being left except the shiny and
pretty coffins with dead men's
and women's bones, as truth 
flees further and further 
down the road. 

When I Met the First African-American Pulitzer Prize Winner

Despite being busy working on a means of getting bread and butter, I decided I would take a brief break and write this post so it will not be too belated.  Today is the birthday of poetess Gwendolyn Brooks.  I like words like "poetess" because despite being perhaps dated by some, I feel just calling her a "poet" sounds neutered and draws away from what she really was, a great female poet.  I'm just not into the kind of neutered nonsense a lot of people gravitate towards in the culture. For me that even applies to language.  Gwendolyn Brooks wasn't a guy or an it, she was a woman poet, and that doesn't negate her greatness in any way.  

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) was the first African-American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for her literary work.  She was the Poet Laureate of Illinois.  She was also a politically conscious poet.  

And one day in 1984, I met her.  When I was an undergraduate student at The University of Georgia, she came to speak in a small classroom in the evening in the English department.  I remember a very ordinary looking woman who had a giant presence and intellect.  I talked to her briefly and got her autograph and address. Photos of the flyer and her autograph are below.  

She encouraged me to write to her.  I did write to her once and sent her some poems I wrote, but my heart just was not into poetry writing back then the way it is now. I lacked confidence, not that I'm a mountain of confidence nowadays about my poetry, but I have much more than I did in those days.  I believe I still have the note she sent back to me along with my poetry.  I can't find it right now, but I remember she wrote that I had a good imagination. 

Goodreads.com, which I refer to as a social networking site for book lovers, posts a quote of the day which I receive in my e-mail.  Today was Gwendolyn Brooks' turn.  The quote of the day was by her.

Live not for Battles Won.
Live not for The-End-of-the-Song.
Live in the along. 

I also like this quote of her's. 

Writing is a delicious agony.  

Indeed it is.  

(I will be back with more of my own poetry soon.)