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Art for Life: My Story, My Song
By Kalamu ya Salaam
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Books by Kalamu ya Salaam
The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement / 360: A Revolution of Black Poets
Everywhere Is Someplace Else: A Literary Anthology / From A Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets
Our Music Is No Accident / What Is Life: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self
My Story My Song (CD)
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five. a decade of development (contd.)
Pamoja Tutashinda (together we will win)
After Hofu came Pamoja Tutashinda (Together We Will Win) in 1973, Ibura in 1976, Revolutionary Love in 1978, and Iron Flowers in 1979. Those were the books of poetry written during the decade of my Ahidiana years. I also co-wrote with my wife, Tayari kwa Salaam, two children’s books, and Our Women Keep Our Skies, a collection of essays “In support of the struggle to smash sexism and develop women.” Skies included three poems, two of which became among my most popular poems.
Hofu will always be fondly remembered. It was my first poetry book that was more than just poetry. The cover was a symbolic piece created specifically for the book. Inside we had symbols as well as text. We also mixed essays with poetry. And the poems included both tender and tough pieces. The book was printed in green ink on ivory stock. It set the tone for all the other Ahidiana publications which followed.
You could see growth happening in this book, but you could also see glaring blemishes, particularly a vehement strain of homophobia which Ahidiana would directly tackle within the next four or five years. I know that some people say that “homophobia” was part of the times, but there is no need to hide from the truth. On that account we were backward. Other poems and essays which tackle homophobia head on would follow over the next few years, and thusly demonstrate through both criticism and self-criticism that regardless of where we started from, we kept on developing.
In 1973 we were what I would now call classic Black nationalists. Even though we thought we were being progressive, our position on the woman’s question was suspect. That too would change over the next couple of years. Hofu would have been stronger artistically, if I had been more progressive politically. The feeling was there, the ideas were lagging behind.
Hofu was then both experimental and limited, but it was an attempt to move past status quo examples of what a poetry book should be like.
Here are two selections which demonstrate where we were at in 1973. The first piece, “Lament” is written in the feminine voice and actually had been written somewhere between 1967 and 1968; it was published in the first issue of Nkombo and, because of its subject matter, I choose to include it in Hofu. Audiences used to get really, really quiet when we did this one.
The second “INSPIRATION” is an example of some of the most progressive thoughts cohabiting with some of the most regressive. I used both the word and the image “faggot” in a negative sense. In later years, I would continue using the poem but substituted the word “freak.” Also, in performance this poem was built on a chain gang chant, “Be My Woman” which Nina Simone also used a variation of in her song “See Line Woman.” The chant metamorphosed into a Curtis Mayfield-like ballad, “Love A Good Woman” and ended on a Pharoah Sanders tip. Of course the music is not on the page, but this is an example of how I wrote poems which were designed to be sung, as well as spoken, lyrics.
LAMENT
/for black men everywhere/
when
will our men be men
not of fear and trembling
feeding dark soil with their own
dark blood or
crying yes sirs and halting steps
of broken airs about
themselves
but men:
simply able to love their lives
as men are said to do?
God can you possibly
replenish that lost seed
who were once lovely African chieftains,
princes and such, loving
their queens
Can pride be restored
or must they suffer forever
attempting a shield of their
impotence from our knowing eyes.
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INSPIRATION
THE FLOWER IN THE HOUSE, THE AIR WE BLACK MEN BREATHE
love a good woman
love a good woman
for all the time there is
for all the life there is
for all the best we are
love a good woman
love a woman
love love a good woman
in sunshine, in rain, place
yr house in order, in
balanced on the tear drop of her happiness
on the hair back from her geled* head
on the soft steps she makes
moving toward you being the flower in the house
yr oxygen, yr gettin up fuel
yr no nonsense and strength to do what you got to do
the love of a good woman
loving you love a good woman
yr choice, companion and soul mate,
yr maker really, if you be man
then woman is yr maker, yr woman is yr maker
yr black woman is yr creator, woman
is what you should love yr good woman
is what you need yr good woman to love, to live
yr pleasant voice in the evening and smiles in yr morning
yr soft fingers touch on yr chest calling you king
calling you man, calling you god
you god the giver come on now love yr good woman
she creator the maker, love yr good woman
no man makes himself
woman makes man and love
love a good woman
sister i am incomplete
without you, i am vessel full
of holes, i am spirit begging
substance, i am shadow with
our form, i am baby wait
ing to be born, i am that faggot
walking down the street
not knowing what to do with myself
like singers without song
i need yr tender touch
*head wrapped respectfully Afrikan styled
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In January of 1973 Ahidiana published my third book of poetry Pamoja Tutashinda (Together We Will Win). In advertisements for Pamoja we described it as “A collection of political poems with an introductory essay by Kalamu ya Salaam which is a beginning projection of the ideology of Pan-Afrikan Nationalism.” This was the most didactic of all the books. Strictly an organizing and conscious raising tool. One of the poems, “give a speech/talkin abt ‘da problem’ ” is five typeset pages long in 9 point type. The five part poem was read at many a rally.
Part one poetically asks the question:
give a speech to reach
the masses, to reach this, to reach us
who are tired of words?
give a speech
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Part two responds to the question with cynicism which is itself responded to:
somebodies, some bodies are sayin
that’s the problem nah
niggers talk too much
but is it? is that
really the problem now
is talk why our life expectancy is so short
is talk why we eat so badly
is talk why we work a week for one day’s wages
is talk why everybody laughs at us on television
is talk why we spend so much time in jail
is talk why we have no money, no power, no land
is talk why all our schools are dumb, our teachers dumber
is talk why nobody likes us
nobody likes the Negro
is talk the cause of that
are we here because of talk
think about that,
did talk rape your grandmomma, red?
did talk make you eat pork, abdul?
did talk cut off the gas&lights last night, rhetta?
did talk do this or was it organized people
taking advantage of our ignorance
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Part three rhetorically asks the question: “do we want out of this” and, assuming the answer is yes, goes on to suggest:
then organize
organize to control
control the space we occupy,
control all that space as best we can
the first space being of course, the body, the flesh and
muscle, brain and mind body, control that from hair tip
to toenail, discipline it i.e. self control it
exercise power over it i.e. self-determine it,
self-defend it, self-respect it
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Part four speaks directly to how to organize:
start with the easy, give a dime a day
start with the easy, run one block a day
start with the easy, read for five minutes a day
start with the easy, eat one fruit a day
start with the easy, volunteer fifteen minutes a day
start with the easy and organize to do the undifficult
don’t worry about the heavy problems
all the heavy problems ain’t goin nowhere
just develop self step by step and one by one
we’ll get to everything in due time
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Of course, many, many people reject this as poetry, especially people who are not overwhelmed with social problems and actively seeking a solution. Similarly, people who are relatively comfortable with the status quo reject this as poetry. But what difference does the theme or content of a poem make in terms of whether we are dealing with poetry? It is not the content that makes a poem a poem, but rather the style and presentation.
Pamoja had a cover by Fred O’Neal who had done the cover for Hofu and was printed in black ink on a light tan paper.
In 1973 I made another major move. For two years I had worked as the first director of the Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Health Center. I had also been a founding member of The Black Collegian Magazine in 1970. Both the health center and the magazine were growing. I was offered the assistant directorship of the whole neighborhood health care system with the promise of becoming the director within the next year. I was offered a salary of over $25,000 per annum with benefits. I enjoyed the work of directing an outpatient health care facility located in the neighborhood where I had grown up. So, I quit.
By then, I knew: what I wanted to do more than anything was write. I never will forget, right after signing the contract papers to work at The Collegian, I went to the city welfare department, applied for food stamps and based on the small salary I was drawing at The Collegian I was eligible. I never regretted the move.
The Collegian offered me the opportunity to develop my writing and editing skills. Additionally, I had the opportunity to offer activists in the movement a platform to speak to Black college students across the country. I interviewed a wide variety of activists, artists, and politicians. Sometimes I had three or four interviews and/or articles in each issue. I was even able to help Hoyt Fuller when John Johnson closed down Black World and fired Hoyt. One of the early issues of Hoyt’s new publication, First World, was published in the The Black Collegian as a special insert. My stay as an employee of The Black Collegian paralleled my membership in Ahidiana which had been officially founded in the summer of 1973.
The following year I was selected as a delegate to the Sixth Pan African Congress held over the summer in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania in East Africa. That trip marked the beginning of an on going pattern of traveling around the world as either an activist, a writer of socially committed literature, or a journalist. Before long, I went to the People’s Republic of China, Cuba, Surinam, and numerous destinations in the Caribbean. At the same time that I was developing as a poet and performer, I was also traveling around the world meeting, being inspired by and learning from activists and artists across the globe. My outlook was expanding quickly as a result of these developments and the interaction I was having nationally and internationally.
<—-Hofu ni Kwenu (my fear is for you) Ibura (something special)—>
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
By Charles C. Mann
Im a big fan of Charles Manns previous book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, in which he provides a sweeping and provocative examination of North and South America prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Its exhaustively researched but so wonderfully written that its anything but exhausting to read. With his follow-up, 1493, Mann has taken it to a new, truly global level. Building on the groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby (author of The Columbian Exchange and, Im proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer), Mann has written nothing less than the story of our world: how a planet of what were once several autonomous continents is quickly becoming a single, globalized entity.
Mann not only talked to countless scientists and researchers; he visited the places he writes about, and as a consequence, the book has a marvelously wide-ranging yet personal feel as we follow Mann from one far-flung corner of the world to the next. And always, the prose is masterful. In telling the improbable story of how Spanish and Chinese cultures collided in the Philippines in the sixteenth century, he takes us to the island of Mindoro whose southern coast consists of a number of small bays, one next to another like tooth marks in an apple. We learn how the spread of malaria, the potato, tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar cane have disrupted and convulsed the planet and will continue to do so until we are finally living on one integrated or at least close-to-integrated Earth. Whether or not the human instigators of all this remarkable change will survive the process they helped to initiate more than five hundred years ago remains, Mann suggests in this monumental and revelatory book, an open question.
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about The Persistence of the Color Line is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the positions about Mr. Obama staked out by black commentators on the left and right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley. He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr. Smiley consistently voiced skepticism regarding whether blacks should back Obama . . .
The finest chapter in The Persistence of the Color Line is so resonant, and so personal, it could nearly be the basis for a book of its own. That chapter is titled Reverend Wright and My Father: Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism. Recalling some of the criticisms of Americas past made by Mr. Obamas former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with feeling about his own father, who put each of his three of his children through Princeton but who never forgave American society for its racist mistreatment of him and those whom he most loved. His father distrusted the police, who had frequently called him boy, and rejected patriotism. Mr. Kennedys father relished Muhammad Alis quip that the Vietcong had never called him nigger. The author places his father, and Mr. Wright, in sympathetic historical light.
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The White Masters of the World
From The World and Africa, 1965
W. E. B. Du Bois Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)
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Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan / The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll / Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson / Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804 / January 1, 1804 — The Founding of Haiti
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update 3 May 2009
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