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.

The most famous dream...

If my last post quoted one of the main figures in the Civil Rights Movement, today I devote it to the other half of the struggle, Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. Yes, that “negro” who once frightened white America with just a dream actually said more than that. Anyway, below I leave a link to the speech just in case you want to listen to it, because –this is a personal thought- reading it it’s not enough, you have to listen and let him captivate you with his preaching voice.

Then I want you to spend half a minute reading this:

“For years the Negro has been taught that he is nobody, that his color is a sign of his biological depravity, that his being has been stamped with an indelible imprint of inferiority, that his whole history has been soiled with the filth of worthlessness. All too few people realize how slavery and racial segregation have scarred the soul and wounded the spirit of the black man.”

No more to explain. Just to remark the fact that some people(?) STILL think that black men and women are sexually depraved and physiologically inferior and use it as a shield for their discrimination. And again notice the word STILL, more than forty years later, and with a “mulatto” in the presidency of the most powerful nation. Well, apparently we are ruled by an animal…

But I don’t want to be angry, not today, so I’ll choose another quotation from the same speech:

“In this struggle for racial justice, the Negro must seek to transform his condition of powerlessness into CREATIVE and positive power.”

This could be a second introduction to the main theme of my blog: Black arts; not only verse (which personally I love, as you will see) but also music, film, TV, etc. Some can be seen as another brick in the path for equality or even just the contrary, for self-segregation, but others are just the proof that black and white art are, finally, nothing but plain ART.

Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbUtL_0vAJk

The beginning...

This is my very first post, on the 29th of September 2010. One year ago, I started an adventure in England, a country quite close to this one but, as I discovered with the passing of time, distant and different from my hometown. Some months before that I fell in love with a great guy: he was black, gay and…dead. His name was Langston Hughes and he opened my mind to the African-American experience, which I developed in Nottingham. Caroling Dusk is the name of this blog and it takes it from the compilation of black poems Countee Cullen made on 1927.

As you may guess, this blog is going to tackle questions of race and art most of the time, but as I am a human being, I cannot promise sometimes my words turn into something more…personal. Yet I want to begin with in a more “professional” way and my choice for today is taken from a speech by Malcolm X, that black man some of my friends find particularly handsome and I find extremely inspiring.

“There’s only one way to be free. It’s not something that someone gives to you. It’s something that you take. Nobody can give you independence. Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it. If you can’t take it, you don’t deserve it.”