Category Archives: 2009

Bartleby.

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I read Bartleby, the Scrivener in the eleventh grade. It was required reading for IB English I at my high school.

For the uninitiated, Bartleby was a scrivener, a writer, if you will, who worked for a real estate lawyer. Our modern tongues would define his position as ‘administrative assistant’, or ‘paralegal.’ And while the narrator of the story itself suggests that Bartleby offered no indication of any emotion to his circumstance, I’d submit that underneath the veil of ambivalence, Bartleby hated his job. Bartleby was bored out of his mind. Bartleby only offers a very controlled and passive response to all the directives issued by the boss, ‘I prefer not to.’ We watch this détente between boss and employee unfold over a period of time, and the slow degeneration of Bartleby, the office relocates and Bartleby, the everyman working in the offices of a boom economy, condemned to banal tasks of recording mortgages, deeds for would-be moguls, all the while passively resisting any work that demanded more of his mental mind.  The story concludes with the discovery that Bartleby lived in the old offices and died bereft.

Yeah. Continue reading →

Algophobia

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flickr image. by 68esc

Fat girls named Precious. I think it begins there for me.

In the 2nd grade, I was terrorized by a fat girl named Precious. She wore pink berets and ribbons in her hair. She was her mother’s first born. She was her mother’s only child. They lived across the street. My mom insisted that we play together because she was in want of new friends. Precious went to my elementary school.

Precious was a bully.

I didn’t know how to fight back yet.

I got transferred to a different school. Precious moved away. I don’t know what’s become of her. I’m not sure if I care. She was a bitch; a precocious, insufferable, spoiled bitch that had everything. I had government cheese.

So I may be the last black person on the planet that will go see Precious at the theaters. Continue reading →

The Berlin Wall, 20 years gone – The Big Picture

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via boston.com

I was a freshmen in high school in 1989.

What I remember most about that moment is not the continuing coverage from our three national news networks, but a visit from two West Berliners in my World History class. We were talking about the sweeping changes in Eastern Europe. It was the last week of October. And I asked them if they thought the wall would come down. I remember how quiet the room got when I asked the question. I remember the look of controlled hope and sincerity behind their eyes. One of them responded and said, ‘Dear God I hope it does.’

Some in my class didn’t believe it was possible. When they left, I said to someone, ‘that wall is coming down.’ We’d taken many history classes together, class trips… most of the kids in my freshmen World History class had been in classes with since Golda Meir Elementary. We debated what we understood of world affairs between periods and lunch. We had studied much history together. American History, the Cold War, World War 2, transatlantic slave trade, pogroms. Some of my classmates remained skeptical.

Three weeks later, Jeremy runs to class saying to me, ‘You called it! You called it! How’d you do that? How’d you know it would come down?’ I can’t say now that I knew anything. Now, I can only say that people dream in a common language. And if you saw the truth in the eyes of those two West Berliners in my class in the fall of 1989, three weeks before East Berliners took sledgehammers to concrete, you’d know it was coming. All I can say is that in that moment, I felt the urgency of now, the change that was coming and bent toward the arc of history and watched walls come tumbling down.

Kevin Coval: A Post-Olympic Plan for a City Under Siege

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via huffingtonpost.com

There’s a special place in my heart for the Second City. Born and raised just 90 minutes north of Chicago, my family and I would find ourselves on somewhere on the South Side, crammed around a kitchen table at my favorite aunt’s house. We came to visit often; for school trips, church conferences and family gatherings. Chicago, in my earliest memories, is shorthand for ‘family’.

So it’s no surprise that when Chicago is dealt a blow, I feel it too. And it hurts. It breaks my heart. I see echoes of my beginnings too in broken neighborhoods, broken homes, broken bodies. I remember violence that took some of my classmates before they could reach their 16th birthday. I remember violence that still makes me afraid to wear red and black in neighborhoods in Milwaukee.

Yet in the wake of tragedy, I still have hope. I’ve got friends in Chicago who are doing good work. I’ve got friends who are writers, teachers, artists working with Chicago kids citywide, teaching them to craft words and manifest change in their lives. I’ve got friends who write grants to fund programs that have been victim of too many budget cuts supporting after school programming for high school aged youth. The above video clip is from a documentary about the people and work of Louder Than a Bomb.

I encourage you to read Kevin Coval’s full post. Louder Than A Bomb (LTAB) is approaching its ten-year anniversary. Through writing, poetry and performance, young people have found safe space to explore the struggles they face as teens growing up in tough neighborhoods, as well as the paradox of being between adult and childhood. They are doing all of this by kicking rhymes and writing poems.

Poems. Yeah, I said it. Poems. I know that writing saved my life when I was coming up. Hear me. Writing saved my life. There’s more I can say about that, but that’s for another time, when we’re better acquainted. But you should know this: there are words that can destroy, but there are words that can create. Create possibility, create ideas, create art, create change. Words that remind us to be the change we wish to see in the world.

Affirm Life.

never dreamed you leave in summer…

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I don’t think we could have ever anticipated that the Summer of 2009 would be marked by the passing of giants and innocents.

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Neda Agah-Soltan
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Farrah Fawcet
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Ed McMahon
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Michael Jackson
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Walter Cronkite
Shem Walker
Shem Walker
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John Hughes
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Eunice Shriver
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Ted Kennedy
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Patrick Swayze

A generational struggle continues in Iran, despite Ahmadinejad’s ‘re-election’. And as that conflict still unfolds in the limited information we’re able to gather from the internets, our own civil society bristles in a debate that’s ostensibly about regulation and values. The racial animus came out of the box swinging, masked in rhetoric questioning the legitimacy of the president’s citizenship.
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While we debated the race/class conundrum surrounding Henry Louis ‘Skip’ Gates’ arrest in Cambridge, an army veteran in my own neighborhood was shot and killed by undercover police officers at his front door step.

This wasn’t exactly a reprise of the Summer of Love. Perhaps this summer will be remembered as the Summer of Mourning. Mourning the deaths of young dissidents in Iran, mourning the death of cultural giants, lions of the senate, trusted men of journalism, and artists that defined a generation. And in their wake, I wonder how will we fill these shoes they left us.

Canonization

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We danced hard.

We watched him. We studied those moves. We studied those moves like our lives depended on it. We succeeded and failed. I had no rhythm in 1982. Eight year old me struggled to copy those moves. In third grade at Golda Meir Elementary, we had a talent show and a group of us practiced a dance routine to You Wanna Be Startin Something. I was the weakest link. I danced like the Tin Man in the Wiz, even though I always adored the limberness of the Scarecrow.

I remained a fan but kept it closed to the vest.

My late friend Peter had a saying, ‘Sometimes, you just gotta dance out your demons.’ He picked up from watching an episode of Charmed. I used to mock him, but I still accepted the underlying wisdom.

I’ve been watching old videos of Michael like everyone else has over the past few days. A few videos come to mind, Beat It, Jam, Black or White and the seminal work, Thriller. Watching Michael’s dance solo at the end of the Black or White video (beg at 6:32) I can’t help but feel he was dancing out demons. He morphs from panther to man dancing fluid, masculine, and wild, then back to panther.

Michael was Matrix before the Wachowski Brothers dreamed it.

What were those demons? Only time will tell us the full extent. We saw evidence of them over the years, never quite grasping his metamorphosis from black man to indeterminately ethnic. Perhaps it was a hybrid of love and hate for mankind that compelled him to make his body a template to teach us something. That we are one people, beyond artificial lines of color. I did see that. However, I also saw a soul in crisis, sacrificed to us for contempt and ridicule.

I did eventually figure out how to dance. It was in 1991. Shit was pretty bad then for me, but this song may have saved my life. Flexibility and abandon came when I finally let go and surrendered myself to pulse of the music. And the body memory of those moves revealed themselves to me.

Sometimes, you gotta dance it out.

Only now, I realize that I turn to his songs to help me deal. In his voice, the rage at injustice, poverty, racism, all the things that divide us vibrate underneath his songs. I connected to that. It’s the equivalent of a primal scream for me. Growing up in ’80s and ’90s America and being black were challenging times. My family struggled during those times. My parents couldn’t afford to buy me a Thriller jacket. We ate government cheese. I was lucky to score an old copy of Right On to clip pictures and pullout posters of El Debarge, Michael Jackson, and Prince. There were drugs. There was crime. There were senseless deaths. There was hunger.

Things that make you wanna holler. Or scream.

It seems to me Michael came from a musical tradition to give voice to those struggles. Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On begot Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life, begot the Jackson’s Can You Feel It, begot We are the World begot Man in the Mirror, which begot Heal The World.

He was an artist.

He used music to give voice to our shared frustrations, local and global. He also gave us hope. He entertained us. His videos challenged convention and elevated story. He merged forms revolutionized dance as means of communication. He reminded us that there is ecstasy and joy in dance.

He held his crotch because when you have Kundalini energy moving through you, you gotta try to harness it.

Shiva is known also as the cosmic dancer. It is said that Shiva’s dance manifested in two forms, gentle and violent. Shiva dances to destroy, create and build again. Watching Michael, I can’t help but wonder if that was the energy he was trying to manifest in his fluid motions, pirouettes, pops and locks, gravity defying leans and moonwalks. Michael broke down old forms and barriers in everything and birthed something new.

He was a deeper creative spirit than I had originally imagined. It seems clearer to me now as I look back on all those years with adult eyes. Michael was a student of history and culture. It didn’t seem obvious to me growing up, but now, I’m a better student. I’ve studied other cultures and their dances, and I understand now what Michael was trying to show us.

I weep for yet another marker of the end of my childhood. Nothing lasts forever. It sucks that sometimes you have to lose something to realize how much really had.

But I’ll never forget the dance. I’ll shake my body onto the ground as if all of creation depended on it.

Mad World

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I feel their sense of urgency. And I’m hopeful for their success in achieving self determination as a society. The people deciding who represents them. It’s not so much about the who’s the best leader for the Islamic Republic of Iran. It’s about respect for the process, the structure of the civil society itself. Mousavi is symbol now. I don’t think we’ll ever come to know what kind of leader he would be. But these protests do show that the people were seeking an alternative to Ahmadinejad, a leader that could be a vehicle for reform within their society. And the system failed them.

Remember 1989? There’s a weird symmetry in history. Deja vu all over again. I remember feeling the same desperate sense of urgency and hope and dread for the students in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. I was a tween then, but I understood the longing of an oppressed people challenging the system. Later when we started high school that same year, two German tourists spoke to my world history class and talked about the shifts they were feeling then in their own country. I asked them a question that I felt in bones. I asked them if they thought the Wall would come down. I still remember his facel, and he said, ‘I hope so. I sure hope so.’ It could not have been more than two weeks later and the unthinkable happened. I remember Jeremy running to class the next morning saying to me, ‘Syreeta! How’d you do that? How’d you know? You called it!’

All I can say is that people dream in a common language. If you heard those German tourists in my history class in 1989, you could feel the urgency for change. And I don’t think it’s a stretch that young Germans felt a kinship with the students in Tiananmen Square. In the wake of that tragedy, they might have found their courage to challenge the old order in their nation.

The poignant part of the President’s Cairo speech two weeks ago sort of reads now as a prophetic allusion to events that are now manifesting. Pundits have found fault with the connection with Civil Rights Movement and resistance movements -fringe to moderate- of some Arab communities to regimes. I felt that it struck a very raw nerve. Something that we all had to acknowledge. African Americans learned from the Indian struggle against British rule during the first half of the twentieth century. In 1947, India became a sovereign nation again. Our own history shows how civil disobedience can affect change. It ended injustices my forebearers suffered through. It gave me the right to vote without fear. It seems clear to me now that the Iranian kids heard him. Still, Obama can’t engage them directly. That’s not his purpose at this time. A statesman engages governments. This is a populist movement. And all we can do is watch, support, and hope that human rights are respected.

My color scheme is green so that they know that I’m with them.