Letter from Troy Davis (who was executed tonight. RIP)

I want to thank all of you for your efforts and dedication to Human Rights and Human Kindness, in the past year I have experienced such emotion, joy, sadness and never ending faith. It is because of all of you that I am alive today, as I look at my sister Martina I am marveled by the love she has for me and of course I worry about her and her health, but as she tells me she is the eldest and she will not back down from this fight to save my life and prove to the world that I am innocent of this terrible crime.

As I look at my mail from across the globe, from places I have never ever dreamed I would know about and people speaking languages and expressing cultures and religions I could only hope to one day see first hand. I am humbled by the emotion that fills my heart with overwhelming, overflowing Joy. I can’t even explain the insurgence of emotion I feel when I try to express the strength I draw from you all, it compounds my faith and it shows me yet again that this is not a case about the death penalty, this is not a case about Troy Davis, this is a case about Justice and the Human Spirit to see Justice prevail.

I cannot answer all of your letters but I do read them all, I cannot see you all but I can imagine your faces, I cannot hear you speak but your letters take me to the far reaches of the world, I cannot touch you physically but I feel your warmth everyday I exist.

So Thank you and remember I am in a place where execution can only destroy your physical form but because of my faith in God, my family and all of you I have been spiritually free for some time and no matter what happens in the days, weeks to come, this Movement to end the death penalty, to seek true justice, to expose a system that fails to protect the innocent must be accelerated. There are so many more Troy Davis’. This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe. We need to dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country.

I can’t wait to Stand with you, no matter if that is in physical or spiritual form, I will one day be announcing,

“I AM TROY DAVIS, and I AM FREE!”

Never Stop Fighting for Justice and We will Win!

Toni Morrison's "Beloved"

First of all I have to say to myself: WELCOME BACK! Sorry for this looooooooooong absence.

Well, I finally finished reading Toni Morrison's "Beloved" and, as it is my custom, here I'm gonna leave some of the best quotations of the book (believe me, there were many many more). I promise not to spoil anything as I expect you to read it someday. It's a fantastic book and a must if you like black arts (as I guess you do cause you're following this blog). Feel free to tell me which quote you liked the most:

For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing […] was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one. (Such a sad thought)

Then, with the sun straight up over their heads, they trotted off, leaving the sheriff behind among the damnedest bunch of coons they’d ever seen. All testimony to the results of a little so-called freedom imposed on people who needed every care and guidance in the world to keep them from the cannibal life they preferred. (Hi, sarcasm, nice to meet you)

Some new whitefolks with the Look just rode in. The righteous Look every Negro learned to recognize along with his ma’am’s tit. Like a flag hoisted, this righteousness telegraphed and announced the faggot, the whip, the fist, the lie, long before it went public. (Scary)

Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. He smelled skin, skin and hot blood. The skin was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was a whole other thing. (Summary of Negro history in a few lines. Perfectly expressed)

Whatever is going on outside my door ain’t for me. The world is in this room. This here’s all there is and all there needs to be. (Something I also feel from time to time)

Work well; work poorly. Work a little; work not at all. Make sense; make none. Sleep, wake up; like somebody, dislike others. It didn’t seem much of a way to live and it brought him no satisfaction.

If I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her. (This feeling is more developed in the book, but I found this sentence so fascinating and frightening at the same time)

When she wasn’t smiling she smiled, and I never saw her own smile. (Just love this use of words)

Ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light. (One of the best quotes in the book)

He can’t put his finger on it, but it seems, for a moment, that just beyond his knowing is the glare of an outside thing that embraces while it accuses.

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all in the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” (What love is)

“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.” (Best final sentence ever)

Lena Horne

 Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was an American singer, actress, civil rights activist and dancer.

Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of sixteen and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood, where she had small parts in numerous movies, and more substantial parts in the films Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. Due to the Red Scare and her left-leaning political views, Horne found herself blacklisted and unable to get work in Hollywood.

Returning to her roots as a nightclub performer, Horne took part in the March on Washington in August 1963, and continued to work as a performer, both in nightclubs and on television, while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which ran for more than three hundred performances on Broadway and earned her numerous awards and accolades. She continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, disappearing from the public eye in 2000. (From wikipedia)

She died in New York aged 92.

If you click on the video you will find the Oscar's video in memoriam of those who died this last year. At the very end you can see a moving speech by Halle Berry praising the figure of Horne, the first African-American actress in the industry.

Watch the video

Nikki Giovanni

Yesterday I went back to my online shopping and ordered two books of poetry, one by Philip Larkin (he always makes me smile) and the other one by Nikki Giovanni, a new discovery thanks to bell hooks's book I mentioned in my previous post. Born in Knoxville, 1943, she was a feminist black writer and, to make a difference with who I usually read, SHE'S STILL ALIVE!
Here you have one of her poems but as soon as I have my book I'll share some others with you.

i am 25 years old
black female poet
wrote a poem asking
nigger can you kill
if they kill me
it won't stop
the revolution

i have been robbed
it looked like they knew
that i was to be hit
they took my tv
my two rings
my piece of african print
and my two guns
if they take my life
it won't stop
the revolution

my phone is tapped
my mail is opened
they've caused me to turn
on all my old friends
and all my new lovers
if i hate all black
people
and all negroes
it won't stop
the revolution

if i never write
another poem
or short story
if i flunk out
of grad school
if my car is reclaimed
and my record player
won't play
and if i never see
a peaceful day
or do a meaningful
black thing
it won't stop
the revolution

the revolution
is in the streets
and if i stay on
the fifth floor
it will go on
if i never do
anything

it will go on

---

Books you should take into account

Right now I'm reading these two books about different subjects but related to African-American culture, of course. The first one deals with poetry and drama. The second was written by bell hooks (it's not my mistake, she doesn't write capital letters), a black feminist.

• The Black American Writer. Volume II: poetry and drama. Edited by C.W.E. Bigsby. Penguin Books.

The Black American Writer is a two-volume collection of essays on the Negro literary Achievement. Its purpose is to examine the black community's major talents, to assess the difficulties facing the black writer, and to analyze the problems of criticism in a field fraught with social, cultural, and political prejudice. The essays are by both black and white writers, and considerable space is devoted to the controversy over the white man's motives and qualifications as a critic of black letters.
[...]
Poetry and the drama are the subjects of Volume II, which begins with Jean-Paul Sartre's seminal study "Black Orpheus." Among the major figures whose work is discussed are Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Ossie Davis, and LeRoi Jones.

• Black Looks. Race and representation. By bell hooks. South End Press.

From Publishers Weekly

This latest collection from hooks ( Yearning ) contains a dozen recent essays on the representation of the African American experience, an area in which, she argues convincingly, little progress has been made. The author draws more effectively on her own experiences and sense of identity than do most other writers in the critical theory arena. Her gaze often falls on the ostensible recuperation of blackness into advertising, fashion and pop culture. She denounces white radicals' appropriation of an African American Other that revels in the oneness of a "primitive" people with nature. As she points out, the next step in that process is the commodification of the "primitive" by consumer culture. In other essays hooks offers brilliant analyses of the Hill-Thomas hearings and of Madonna, forcing readers to confront issues of race and representation that fans of the Material Girl would probably rather ignore and revealing the underlying reactionary bent of her music and videos. Equally striking is hooks's linkage of feminism and gay and lesbian liberation to black liberation, with a resulting rejection of a narrow and facile nationalism. Imbued with hooks's theoretical rigor, intellectual integrity, breadth of knowledge and passion, this book is a necessary read for anyone concerned with race in America.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

I Wanna Read, Let me Read

Here I recommend you the best book I've found about African-American culture and the essay Langston Hughes wrote in the 1920s.

 

The African-American Experience

By Kai Wright

This amazingly useful (and huge) book composes of the best speeches, letters, songs, poems, stories and editorials about black history and culture. Its editor, Kai Wright, masterly selects pieces of black American culture like real slaves’ recordings, Frederick Douglass’s writings or Countee Cullen’s poems and of white American people about African-Americans. Personal experiences, like a Katrina’s survivor’s or a Free Negro’s give a new sentimental dimension to the book. Poems, stories and songs help to make it more entertaining and artistic. Speeches of great black figures like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. or Muhammad Ali just knock you down.

The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

By Langston Hughes

“An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose.” This sentence summarizes perfectly Hughes’s writing. It was written as a response to Countee Cullen’s rebellion against the notion of “Negro poet”. In this essay Hughes rejects any suggestion or assistance from white benefactors because he thinks that black people are able to talk not only about their good aspects but also about their sometimes ugly reality. Those who are interested in black culture must read this essay, as Hughes is the most outstanding figure in Harlem Renaissance, i.e. the black Cultural Revolution in the early 20^th century.  Read it completely here: The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

Jean Toomer

To my reduced amount of followers I first have to say SORRY. I’ve been absent for a few days and even today, that I’m sick, I feel I don’t have quality stuff to say. But even though, I want to offer you a bit of African-American poetry. Today’s poet was discovered to me thanks to a man I met last year in Nottingham and whose advice I take really seriously considering he lived for a while in the States. So thank you, Zahir.

From http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/71:

“Jean Toomer was born in 1894 in Washington, D.C, the son of a Georgian farmer. Though he passed for white during certain periods of his life, he was raised in a predominantly black community and attended black high schools. In 1914, he began college at the University of Wisconsin but transferred to the College of the City of New York and studied there until 1917.

Toomer spent the next four years writing and published poetry and prose in Broom, The Liberator, The Little Review and others. He actively participated in literary society and was acquainted with such prominent figures as the critic Kenneth Burke, the photographer Alfred Steiglitz and the poet Hart Crane.

In 1921, Toomer took a teaching job in Georgia and remained there four months; the trip represented his journey back to his Southern roots. His experience inspired his book Cane, a book of prose poetry describing the Georgian people and landscape.

In the early twenties, Toomer became interested in Unitism, a religion founded by the Armenian George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. The doctrine taught unity, transcendence and mastery of self through yoga: all of which appealed to Toomer, a light-skinned black man preoccupied with establishing an identity in a society of rigid race distinctions. He began to preach the teachings of Gurdjieff in Harlem and later moved downtown into the white community. From there, he moved to Chicago to create a new branch of followers.

Toomer was married twice to wives who were white, and was criticized by the black community for leaving Harlem and rejecting his roots for a life in the white world; however, he saw himself as an individual living above the boundaries of race. His meditations center around his longing for racial unity, as illustrated by his long poem "Blue Meridian." He died in 1967.”

I really loved this poem, because of its simplicity and also because I particularly like when people how to concentrate so much in so few words. Hope you like it too.

Hair-

silver-grey,

like streams of stars,

Brows-

recurved canoes

quivered by the ripples blown by pain,

Her eyes-

mist of tears

condensing on the flesh below

And her channeled muscles

are cluster grapes of sorrow

purple in the evening sun

nearly ripe for the worms.