Octavia McBride-Ahebee

Mika Kaurismaki's Mama Africa; Miriam Makeba

2012-01-21T08:14:00.000-08:00

Photo- Martin Beck

A couple of weeks ago, I went to see the documentary Sing Your Song, which was about Harry Belafonte’s political activism over the years. I was prepared not to like the film and to maintain my very lukewarm appreciation of Belafonte’s talent and his place as a social and political crusader. I left the International House, where the film was presented, completely enamored of Belafonte and shocked at myself for knowing so little about his long, persistent, global fight for justice and all that this entails.

Belafonte, along with some other people, who you’ll learn about in the film below, was responsible for introducing South African Singer Miriam Makeba to American audiences. Miriam Makeba and Winnie Mandela were the women who made South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle pertinent to me as a young girl and college student demanding that her college divest from companies doing business in South Africa. Below is a link to Finnish filmmaker Mika Kaurismaki’s new documentary about Mama Africa; Miriam Mekaba. Have a look and a listen.

Serendipity … Taking Up the Story; Binyavanga Wainaina

2012-01-13T22:22:00.000-08:00

*Photo-Playwright Mona R. Washington and our Maasai Visitor

My friend Mona and I went one winter Sunday afternoon in search of lamb shawarma, stuffed grape leaves and baba ghanoush. We were in the Overbrook neighborhood, of Philadelphia, headed to our beloved Mediterra Grille when these two lovely, traditionally dressed Maasai men crossed, seemingly from nowhere, like a mirage, in front of the car we were in. And we said simultaneously and incredulously, “Are those Maasai?” We were instantaneously transported back to our own times in Kenya and our own memories with the Maasai people.

We followed those two gentlemen into the neighborhood coffeehouse and had a wonderful afternoon of tea and talk about Kenya. I share this to introduce another Kenyan gem; writer Binyavanga Wainaina, who represents this new generation of African writers, whose narratives aren’t focused on doom and groom or helping the outsider understand the “African way.” When I think of Wainaina, I think of him as a 21st century male version of Zora Neale Hurston. His tells his own narrative placing himself and his culture front and center. You might be familiar with Wainaina who wrote that deliciously infamous essay, How to Write About Africa: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDWlMX2ToSc

Binyavanga Wainaina is the founding editor of the literary magazine Kwani? and won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2002. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, and National Geographic. He is the director of the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College. He divides his time between Nairobi, Kenya and upstate New York.

Here is a link to Wainaina reading from his new memoir One Day I Will Write about This Place.

http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Granta-Audio-Binyavanga-Wainaina

CRED Magazine; Amplifying the Voice and Vision of Young Philly

2012-01-07T09:55:00.000-08:00

January 2012 Issue

The Village of the Arts and Humanities is a local gem with a national reputation and it has been providing opportunities for young people to explore their concerns and interests through art and culture. Hot off the press is its gorgeous publication CRED Magazine; Amplifying the Voice and Vision of Young Philly.

CRED is defined by the Village as “an arts and culture magazine that supports Philly’s young artists, designers, journalists, activists and entrepreneurs by providing them with opportunities to contribute and curate published content as well as advertise their business and services.”

My 13 year-old son has a wonderful self-portrait he painted which is included in this new issue. The magazine is free and you can pick it up all around town. Ten thousand copies have been printed. Here is a link to a sample of the magazine: http://issuu.com/credmagazine/docs/cred-magzine-issue1

and here is a link to venues where you can pick up your copy : http://villagearts.org/2012/arts/where-to-find-cred

Where My Birthmark Dances

2011-12-26T22:02:00.000-08:00

Here’s a Christmas present from my daughter. My sweet sixteen-year-old made the following video of me reading one my poems- Where My Birthmark Dances. This poem is inspired by the many women who are forced, due to dire economic conditions, to leave their children and home countries and seek work abroad.

Nikky Finney- Left

2011-12-20T14:29:00.000-08:00

Poet Furaha Youngblood to Present Her New Poetry Collection at the Southwest Arts Center in Atlanta

2011-12-01T19:45:00.000-08:00

Furaha Youngblood-writer, educator, world traveler and my dear friend-has a new book of poetry out entitled Cat-Eyed Woman from Louisiana. Now, if this title alone doesn’t whet your appetite or the blurb above, I don’t know what will. Furaha will participate in the 2011 Book Fair sponsored by the Fulton County Arts and Culture Center , in Atlanta. Readings will be scheduled throughout the day.

Saturday, December 10, 2011
10:00 a.m-3:00 p.m.
Fulton Country Arts & Culture’s Southwest Arts Center
915 New Hope Road
Atlanta, GA 30331
Phone: 404-613-3220

World AIDS Day-Dec. 1, 2011-Remembering A Great Love

2011-11-30T08:39:00.000-08:00

Photo by Mozambique PEPFAR team

The Japanese Teahouse
To Greg Witcher
By Octavia McBride-Ahebee

I can now see
the skirt hems of hants
stitched by the hands of the living
they keep with them in this sphere
the shame and vanity of us all
and so hide their naked spirits
in calico gowns shielding indigo slips
made loose for easy movement

La Fleur cannot see the ghosts of this house
vying for perfume and overripe papaya
spreading like yeast
in anticipation of bounty
spreading with the unyielding spell of raw cauliflower
He hears their whispers
entangled in the whistling overtones of searching mice
their frosted threats to lick
the healing fungus off the backs of caterpillars
and press into dust with their weightless humor
another cloak of his torment
-the anointed AZT

Yet
his third eye is sane, blighted
perceiving the lust of fear
flapping in its own daydreams
anxious to walk backwards
with those who die away from home

La Fleur wants to sleep with cannons
near the vacant majesty of the Citadelle
under the guard of the grand Baron Samedi
in a grave that slides with no conscience
when the soil breathes too heavily
when forgotten things are collected

He wants to leave my city of foot-long sandwiches
and soft pretzels,
of trolley cars that triumph underneath the unbecoming frailty
of a cowed city
whose river has no bend
to return to Cap-Haitian
saluting the honeyed fantasies of home
spawned by the simple need
of man who can’t build on the cunning of tomorrow

I whisper in his ear still open to thought
I hold his hand, scaled and aloof,
still greedy for the soles of other’s fingertips
I say forget the cannons
and the piece of earth that exhales with no attention
my hants are vain
they dress in slips of purple and blue
today, we will sip evergreen plants
in the park where the Japanese teahouse sings
and we will berate any presumption
yours were days unspent.

Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology -Read On

2011-11-29T17:21:00.000-08:00

Illustration by Sharon Rosenzweig

Please explore the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology which is ever growing and now runs 538 pages. Round and Whole, a poem by me-Octavia McBride-Ahebee-, can be found on pp. 493-494. And do also check out the illustrations by Sharon Rosenzweig of real OWS supporters, which starts on p. 403.

Here’s the link:

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/occupy-wall-street-library-releases-writing-prompt_b43059

Harvest of the Tongue; An Artist Survives- Mossa Bildner and Us All

2011-11-22T17:18:00.000-08:00

Gary Lucas and Mossa Bildner

I recently watched the movie version of The Grapes of Wrath with my children after serving another inventive interpretation of spaghetti as an elegant family meal. It’s hard to believe this movie was made in 1940. I had forgotten how bold and brave and honest this film is and its continued relevancy still rings clear. The fight is still on.

Artist, composer, singer, linguist, translator and teacher Mossa Bildner is the face of me and so many others. Thank God or whoever, that we have our art to keep us buoyed, because these are sinister times. I salute her example of holding her head up and a giving a face and a voice to where We are in this space and time.

This interview was recorded two years ago.

Listen to Mossa: http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/12/19/nyregion/1247466202854/neediest-an-artist-survives.html?ref=neediestcases

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/nyregion/20neediest.html

Gloria Steinem and Mona Eltahawy in Conversation; Dreaming is a Form of Planning

2011-11-20T09:44:00.000-08:00

Mona Eltahawy and Gloria Steinem

Poppies by Georgia O'Keeffe

Ladies, even gentleman, get your coffee or whatever drink gives you comfort and listen to this wonderfully enlightening conversation between American feminist Gloria Steinem and Egyptian feminist Mona Eltahawy.

http://hammer.ucla.edu/watchlisten/watchlisten/show_id/759419

All is Well- Naseer Shamma

2011-11-18T08:32:00.000-08:00

The Fabulous Iraqi Oud Player Naseer Shamma

Give yourself this treat and listen:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwcm1oHVVlo&feature=related

Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa- A Point of Entry into the World

2011-11-16T17:47:00.000-08:00

Photo-Ed Kashi

Photo- Ed Kashi

Photo-Ed Kashi

In 1994, I was a new, middle-aged American bride living in my husband’s home of Cote d’Ivoire. I had arrived in August and by November I was student at the University of Abidjan’s French language program for non-French speakers. At that time, Liberia’s civil war was in full rage and many Liberians had taken refuge in Abidjan. Some were lucky enough to receive United Nations scholarships which enabled them to take French language courses at the University of Abidjan as well. They became my peers, my friends and my refuge from the callousness of Francophones. They were also my point of entry into Liberian history, Liberian-American history, factional fighting, changing alliances and the delicious joy of rice with palava sauce.

During my brief stint as a formal student in this university, I had many introductions, by my classmates who came from all over English-speaking Africa, to their ambitions, to their struggles and the struggles and successes of their home countries. Though I had had a long history with Nigerians back home, through literature, friendships and as a child when my grandmother hosted a couple-Gabriel and Martini- during the Biafra War, I had never known about the Ogoni people of Nigeria, the Niger Delta and the environmental degradation oil companies like Shell had unleashed. It was Boma, a young man and classmate from the Niger Delta oil region of Nigeria, who so passionately articulated the history of this region and the unchecked abuses it sustained at the hands of big, Western oil companies with the complicity of the Nigerian government.

Over grilled corn or plantain, under fruit trees I listened to Boma and learned of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other equally courageous people and whole communities who challenged the environmental, economic and political abuses perpetrated in their homeland. It was this time I became a short wave radio fiend and listened throughout the day to the BBC’s African service. I could hear interviews with Mr. Saro-Wiwa and follow his campaigns. He became a hero for me on this African sojourn.

In November of 1995, I was still in Cote d’Ivoire, pregnant with my first child, who was due at the end of that month. I was in love with my life and my family and my new country. I cannot describe the devastation and sense of disbelief I physically felt when I heard on Nov. 10, 1995 that the Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged by the Nigerian government with the complicity of Shell Oil.

As Americans, we have seen firsthand, with our recent experience with the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, what shameless and rapacious behaviors these oil companies display. Well, know that the people of the Niger Delta region have been experiencing this for decades and nothing has been done. Know that this is happening and raise your concerns.

Ed Kashi is a phenomenal photojournalist. The above photos are his and here is a link to an interview he gave concerning his project in the Niger Delta. http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/q-and-a/1720326/vii-photos-ed-kashi-we-change-consume

Here is my poem inspired by Ken Saro-Wiwa and the simple fact that the personal is the political. Here in my poem is a couple on a lovers’ chase , whose every movement is met by some apparatus associated with the oil extraction activity.

A Chase Through the Niger Delta
For Ken Saro-Wiwa
By Octavia McBride-Ahebee

When my feet pound the damp earth
distancing themselves from the fears of the day
awakening,
as my toes collect mineral wealth
and ancestors’ blessings,
the hope of the world
because I am chased by a lover
in heat
in whose mouth sprouts mango-colored hibiscus,
our blissful flight is still broken,
overthrown by surface pipes,
snaking conduits of slick poison,
fallen piñatas full of slippery promises
lined in fire and incessant flares
engulfing
with fury and inflamed detachment
the tops of our crop’s heads
drowning our stomachs in greasy blackness
stuffing our chest with soot and oil’s disdain
is how a pair of lovers
whose day began unspoiled
fueled by the thrill of a dreamy chase
became uninspired and polluted.
-the end-

I Come Each Day to the Whole of the World

2011-11-09T18:33:00.000-08:00

Drawing by Omar S. of I.C.S.A.

Here’s the link to a recent interview I did with Miriam’s Well; Poetry, Land Art and Beyond. Enjoy!
http://miriamswell.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/3-questions-for-octavia-mcbride-ahebee/

On Being Gay, Ghanaian and Many Other Things; Kwame Anthony Appiah

2011-11-08T20:35:00.000-08:00

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah/ Photo-Greg Martin

I count Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ghanaian-British philosopher, Princeton University Professor and president of the Pen American Center, as one of a very few contemporary academics who has successfully engaged non-academics to entertain many of his ideas concerning moral and political thought. He is very much the public philosopher is same way I count Cornel West, Noam Chomsky and Henry Louis Gates.

I found his discussion about being gay and Ghanaian fascinating and insightful. Here is the link to that discussion.

http://bigthink.com/ideas/24107

Nikki Rosa and the Photographs of Nana Kofi Acquah

2011-11-07T08:01:00.000-08:00

Photo- Nana Kofi Acquah

An excerpt from Nikki Giovanni’s “Nikki Rosa”

….And though you're poor it isn't poverty that
concerns you
and though they fought a lot
it isn't your father's drinking that makes any difference
but only that everybody is together and you
and your sister have happy birthdays and very good
Christmases
and I really hope no white person ever has cause
to write about me
because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they'll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy

I thought of this poem when I awoke one morning last week to be greeted in my inbox by the wonderful photographs of Ghanaian photographer Nana Kofi Acquah. Many of the photographs were of my beloved Cote d’Ivoire and they showed what I remember and keep in my heart; the beauty, the resilience and innovation of a phenomenal people. Like the Giovanni, Acquah celebrates what most outsiders can’t get or don’t want to and that is we make our way in this world, despite unimaginable obstacles, and we do so using our humanity and sheer inventiveness. And we arrive often at what is joyous and celebratory. Enjoy these photographs of Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana and support Acquah’s efforts. Here’s the link.

http://nanakofiacquah.blogspot.com/

Solidarity Statement from Cairo

2011-10-28T19:26:00.000-07:00

I just left University of Penn’s Irvine Auditorium and a full house enraptured by Angela Davis, who still has fire in her soul. She referenced and analyzed many human movements, including Occupy Wall Street. She quoted a bit from the following statement addressed to us, by some participants in the Egyptian uprising. Here is the whole, brilliant statement. Read it and be inspired to move in a new direction. And by the way, I am so inspired the hundreds of young people who came out to listen to Ms. Davis tonight. Bravo to us all.

Solidarity Statement from Cairo

To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it's our turn to pass on some advice.

Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call“The Arab Spring” has its roots in the demonstrations, riots, strikes and occupations taking place all around the world, its foundations lie in years-long struggles by people and popular movements. The moment that we find ourselves in is nothing new, as we in Egypt and others have been fighting against systems of repression, disenfranchisement and the unchecked ravages of global capitalism (yes, we said it, capitalism): a System that has made a world that is dangerous and cruel to its inhabitants. As the interests of government increasingly cater to the interests and comforts of private, transnational capital, our cities and homes have become progressively more abstract and violent places, subject to the casual ravages of the next economic development or urban renewal scheme.

An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and emotionally, that we have no future in the current order of things. Living under structural adjustment policies and the supposed expertise of international organizations like the World Bank and IMF, we watched as our resources, industries and public services were sold off and dismantled as the “free market” pushed an addiction to foreign goods, to foreign food even. The profits and benefits of those freed markets went elsewhere, while Egypt and other countries in the South found their immiseration reinforced by a massive increase in police repression and torture.

The current crisis in America and Western Europe has begun to bring this reality home to you as well: that as things stand we will all work ourselves raw, our backs broken by personal debt and public austerity. Not content with carving out the remnants of the public sphere and the welfare state, capitalism and the austerity-state now even attack the private realm and people's right to decent dwelling as thousands of foreclosed-upon homeowners find themselves both homeless and indebted to the banks who have forced them on to the streets.

So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy , real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable? Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of our legitimacy.

In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered people entering the Square every day in tears because it was the first time they had walked through those streets and spaces without being harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these spaces are fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are public spaces. Spaces forgathering, leisure, meeting, and interacting – these spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and the interests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world, particularly for the marginalized, excluded and for those groups who have suffered the worst .

What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and abstract nor as quotidian as “real democracy”; the nascent forms of praxis and social engagement being made in the occupations avoid the empty ideals and stale parliamentarianism that the term democracy has come to represent. And so the occupations must continue, because there is no one left to ask for reform. They must continue because we are creating what we can no longer wait for.
But the ideologies of property and propriety will manifest themselves again. Whether through the overt opposition of property owners or municipalities to your encampments or the more subtle attempts to control space through traffic regulations, anti-camping laws or health and safety rules. There is a direct conflict between what we seek to make of our cities and our spaces and what the law and the systems of policing standing behind it would have us do.
We faced such direct and indirect violence , and continue to face it . Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government's own admission; 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party's offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28 th of January they retreated, and we had won our cities.

It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose. If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used when we shouted “peaceful” with fetishizing nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.

By way of concluding then, our only real advice to you is to continue, keep going and do not stop. Occupy more, find each other, build larger and larger networks and keep discovering new ways to experiment with social life, consensus, and democracy. Discover new ways to use these spaces, discover new ways to hold on to them and never givethem up again. Resist fiercely when you are under attack, but otherwise take pleasure in what you are doing, let it be easy, fun even. We are all watching one another now, and from Cairo we want to say that we are in solidarity with you, and we love you all for what you are doing.

Comrades from Cairo.
24th of October, 2011.

Conversations with Writers- Octavia McBride-Ahebee

2011-10-26T13:43:00.000-07:00

Painting by Zhang Yaowu

Here’s a link to my interview with Conversations With Writers( Oct. 26, 2011) in promotion of my new collection of Poetry-Where My Birthmark Dances, published by Finishing Line Press.

http://conversationswithwriters.blogspot.com/2011_10_01_archive.html

Support Film Project: The Undocumented by Filmmaker Marco Williams

2011-10-20T08:20:00.000-07:00

This skull, part of the remains of a 26 year-old migrant woman,
was found in a remote stretch of Arizona's Sonora desert.

...though you are brave

a believer in dragons and dinosaurs

and their messy intrigues

I will spare you

the whole truth of her journey to you…

from Where My Birthmark Dances

By Octavia McBride-Ahebee

The

above photos are of shoes found in the Arizona desert; shoes of migrants who have died in the desert. Deborah McCullough is an artist who uses objects left behind by dead migrants, many who remain unknown, to remind us of the human cost to aspire, of “the vastness of desire.” There is also a photo of a bible and a cross made by a migrant out of aluminum foil as a last bid for mercy.

Thousands of people ride the oceans’ waves, cross deserts, crawl through tunnels and scale fences in search of what we want; “ to eat, to laugh, to grow into ideas.” As a society, we have failed to respect them, to extend protections and to promote foreign policies that would negate them from leaving their home countries in the first place.

I am a major devotee of the work of independent filmmaker Marco Williams. His body of films include In Search of Our Fathers, Inside the New Black Panthers, I Sit Where I Want; The Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education and Freedom Summer to name a few. He is now working to complete his documentary called The Undocumented. Here is a link to the trailer.

http://www.theundocumented.com/p/trailer.html

Mr. Williams needs our support to help him complete this project. Kickstarter, the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world, allows us-the every person-to fund projects we believe in. Kickstarter allows artists to deliver a truth not diluted and distorted by corporate and political dollars. Here’s the link to Marco Williams discussing the importance of The Undocumented:

http://vimeo.com/26269006

Here is the link to Kickstarter and your way to lend support to this project. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/395311292/the-undocumented

Jean Binta Breeze-

2011-10-19T07:08:00.000-07:00

Jamaica Poet Jean Binta Breeze

I adore her melodious, enchanting and very honest delivery. Give yourself a morning treat and have a listen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBT-2n05eD4&feature=related

An Overdue Victory for Zoliswa Nkonyana

2011-10-16T09:21:00.000-07:00

Photos-Zanele Muholi

Photo-Zanele Muholi

Photo- Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi is a South African, lesbian photographer who uses her photos as a form of activism. Muholi has documented more than 50 rapes targeting lesbians in various South African townships as well as continues to capture the everyday lives of women who dare to love.

More than six years ago, 19 year-old Zoliswa Nkonyana was beaten to death because she was a lesbian. According to the Mail & Guardian, “In what gay lobby groups have termed a classic hate crime, the 19-year-old was clubbed, kicked and beaten to death by a mob of about 20 young men on February 4, 2006. The youths, aged between 17 and 20, chased Nkonyana, pelted her with bricks and finally beat her with a golf club a few metres from her home. ..”

Finally after five years of postponements, last week four men were convicted of the murder of Zoliswa Nkonyana and three others were acquitted of the original 9 arrested. To learn more about this case and the particular challenges of Black lesbians in South Africa read the following article by Diane Anderson-Minshall .

http://www.advocate.com/printArticle.aspx?id=238475

Under Our Skin, Too;Breast Cancer Around the World- For Ahou

2011-10-15T00:28:00.000-07:00

Painting by Eric Larkin

My daughter was born on a Thursday, in Cote d’Ivoire into the Akan group of the Baoule. Though my husband and I had already decided to name our first child Sojourner after the indomitable Sojourner Truth, we had decided her middle name would be the traditional name designated for the day of the week in which she would be born. There was one caveat; if she was born on a Thursday, my husband was insistent that Sojourner would not be given the name of Ahou.

For both us, names carried powers and omens of their own and my husband’s mother, who was named Ahou, had had such a difficult life. And her ending was especially full of torment because she died of untreated breast cancer. My husband had witnessed her agonizing exit out of this world. He did not want his daughter burdened by his mother’s history.

Our daughter was born on a Thursday. And though Sojourner does not carry the name of her paternal grandmother-Ahou-, she is every bit the feisty, proud person that her maymay was. Ahou, Ahou, Ahou…

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and I invite my readers to consider women in other parts of the world and uninsured women here, in the United States, who have no access or very limited access to healthcare that could save their lives.

I wrote the following poem in memory of my mother-in-law and those traditional healers who, in the face of unfamiliar and rapacious challenges like breast cancer, are undeterred in their search for a cure.

Homesick Spirits

By Octavia McBride-Ahebee

Aya brought back,

carrying vestiges of her pride in her hip,

a caged bird from the city

whose tongue had been eaten

by the whipping tongues of red-headed salamanders

and whose throat, tautly strapped in a malachite choker

with gems made of coffee and bark,

danced holding the cadence of lost crickets.

Aya, our village healer,

the child who pushed

feet first into an empty Friday

afternoon

had grown flat, faithless in the knowledge

of her plants

in their power to seduce with fragrance and fear

these new homesick spirits

who stand at the doors of our breasts

bu ld

ing tunnels with its anger to the tips

where our children once sucked relief

from the taunts of companion spirits who float alone.

I tore-off the dry reeds of my roof

cutting it with a dead cross

dressed in tired, singing cowry shells

to let in the weight and tales of the rain

waiting beneath the stomach of a headless pain

to offer my breast to a star in wanderlust

after I had c l awe

the earth with the whole

of my body

tempting it with the blood of dense life

if it would feast on the whole of my left dreams

But Aya, my friend with two daughters

who lay in the ground with faces down,

hooded in dyed Guinea cloth

with one breast between them,

said be p a t i e n t ,

homesick spirits, she recently learned,

preferred to feed on the sorrow of silenced birds

than r

t inside an aged breast

that

hangs w th no

JOY.

-the end-

My Combs Have Names- A Hair Story

2011-10-12T08:33:00.000-07:00

Painting By Endia Summer

Here is the link to my first guest post for Blackgirl Flow, a blog emanating from England and run by some very conscientious, fashion-minded African-British ladies. Here it is : http://blackgirlflow.blogspot.com/

All That You Have Is Your Soul- Bravo to the Poets Brigade Marching on Wall Street

2011-10-10T21:06:00.000-07:00

Tracey Chapman by Guillermo Contreras

Listen to Chapman's All That You Have is Your Soul

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoNtYC_XDC8

Poet Charles Bernstein

2011 Nobel Prize for Peace is For Our Daughters

2011-10-07T18:37:00.000-07:00

This year's prize is for you.

Karman, Gbowee, Sirleaf

I received with great joy today’s announcement by the Nobel Prize committee that Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee and Yemen’s Tawakul Karman received this year’s prize for peace. My visit to Liberia and my years spent in Cote d’Ivoire were ones that coincided with Liberia’s horrific civil war. Hundreds of thousands of Liberians found refuge in neighboring Cote d’Ivoire and many became my dear friends as well as the subject of my literary work. War exacts a brutal toll, especially with regard to women. As Virginia Woolf stated, “War is not women’s history,” and so it is necessary to tell and celebrate herstories, particularly in the context of something we did not create. Bravo not only to the individual women who won this award, but to the millions of women whose simple allegiance to human decency raises the bar for us all.

Listen to Malian singer Rokia Traore. Her voice embodies gentle hope.

Derrick Bell- A Life of Ethical Ambition

2011-10-07T08:55:00.000-07:00

During a recent interview, I discussed at length and with great passion the lasting influence of a great teacher. As a teacher myself, I never tire of hearing stories from other people about their encounters with phenomenal educators. My friend and wonderful playwright, Mona R. Washington, always shared her love and respect for her law professor Derrick Bell, who died yesterday. He was Harvard Law School's first tenured African-American law professor. Though many of us may only know Professor Bell through his seminal work on racism in the United States and his brave activism, I had the privilege of listening to Ms. Washington, who had maintained her relationship with Prof. Bell over the years, praise his insight, his brilliance and his generosity.

Here is a link in honor of this great mind and soulful activist.

http://kalamu.posterous.com/obit-professor-derrick-bell

Here's Al Green singing A Change's Gonna Come

The Faces of the Americas- Calle 13

2011-09-29T07:38:00.000-07:00

By Sadie Gustafson-Zook

There was an arts journal-International Quarterly-edited by Van K. Brock that so beautifully attempted to share the concerns and ideas of artists and writers from around the world. Unfortunately this journal has met its demise, but I was lucky enough to have had work included in one of its issues: Faces of the Americas. How absolutely gorgeous this issue was both in terms of its aesthetics and quality. And it was so successful in communicating the huge diversity of people and cultures that comprise the Americas.

The Puerto Rican duo Calle 13 did a music collaboration in Peru and produced Latinoamerica and this visually celebratory video shows-off our diversity. I love it!!!

I Will be a Humming Bird- Wangari Maathai

2011-09-26T06:48:00.000-07:00

Wangari Maathai 1940-2011

I remember when my daughter had to do a review of the book After Gandhi; 100 Years of Nonviolent Resistance. This book profiled nonviolent activists from around the world and my daughter was quite taken by Wangari Maathai and empowered by her story. The two following links share some of Maathai’s spirit and bold ambition. Her example ushered an awakening for Kenyan women and young people who were emboldened to harness their resources and take ownership of their lives-however daunting this endeavor might seem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGMW6YWjMxw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5GX6JktJZg

I am so excited by the young writers coming of out Kenya and their unabashed honesty about how things stand in this world. Few embody this more than the writer Binyavanga Wainaina. Like many of us, including my daughter, we owe a debt to Maathai for making us fearless and courageous in the face of what is right. What a legacy to leave behind. Here is Wainaina’s How Not To Write About Africa narrated by actor Djimon Hounsou.

A Light to Illuminate the Path- Poet Mahmoud Darwish/ 1941-2008

2011-09-25T07:45:00.000-07:00

I am an old poet and I am still stirred and inspired by the profound and eloquent advice Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish generously offers in his poem, To A Young Poet. My teenage-poet daughter, who I have been meticulously grooming to take careful note of the ways of world and how people negotiate their desires within the confines of inequity and injustice, has left my assiduous tutelage to begin her own journey. I gave her a copy of Mr. Darwish’s poem to light her way.

“Breaking bread with the dead,” is how W. H. Auden so accurately described part of the process of creating poetry. Your ideas, your style, the cadences carried in your poems are invariably informed by those not so gentle people-the poets you have read and heard and who have settled in your very being. On September 23, 2011, when Palestine requested full United Nations membership, I awoke to the silent, waspy voice of Darwish saying, “get up girl and meet the world with a new poem.”

To A Young Poet

By Mahmoud Darwish

Translated By Fady Joudah

Don’t believe our outlines, forget them

and begin from your own words.

As if you are the first to write poetry

or the last poet.

If you read our work, let it not be an extension of our airs,

but to correct our errs

in the book of agony.

Don’t ask anyone: Who am I?

You know who your mother is.

As for your father, be your own.

Truth is white, write over it

with a crow’s ink.

Truth is black, write over it

with a mirage’s light.

If you want to duel with a falcon

soar with the falcon.

If you fall in love with a woman,

be the one, not she,

who desires his end.

Life is less alive than we think but we don’t think

of the matter too much lest we hurt emotions’ health.

If you ponder a rose for too long

you won’t budge in a storm.

You are like me, but my abyss is clear.

And you have roads whose secrets never end.

They descend and ascend, descend and ascend.

You might call the end of youth

the maturity of talent

or wisdom. No doubt, it is wisdom,

the wisdom of a cool non-lyric.

One thousand birds in the hand

don’t equal one bird that wears a tree.

A poem in a difficult time

is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.

Example is not easy to attain

so be yourself and other than yourself

behind the borders of echo.

Ardor has an expiration date with extended range.

So fill up with fervor for your heart’s sake,

follow it before you reach your path.

Don’t tell the beloved, you are I

and I am you, say

the opposite of that: we are two guests

of an excess, fugitive cloud.

Deviate, with all your might, deviate from the rule.

Don’t place two stars in one utterance

and place the marginal next to the essential

to complete the rising rapture.

Don’t believe the accuracy of our instructions.

Believe only the caravan’s trace.

A moral is as a bullet in its poet’s heart

a deadly wisdom.

Be strong as a bull when you’re angry

weak as an almond blossom

when you love, and nothing, nothing

when you serenade yourself in a closed room.

The road is long like an ancient poet’s night:

plains and hills, rivers and valleys.

Walk according to your dream’s measure: either a lily

follows you or the gallows.

Your tasks are not what worry me about you.

I worry about you from those who dance

over their children’s graves,

and from the hidden cameras

in the singers’ navels.

You won’t disappoint me,

if you distance yourself from others, and from me.

What doesn’t resemble me is more beautiful.

From now on, your only guardian is a neglected future.

Don’t think, when you melt in sorrow

like candle tears, of who will see you

or follow your intuition’s light.

Think of yourself: is this all of myself?

The poem is always incomplete, the butterflies make it whole.

No advice in love. It’s experience.

No advice in poetry. It’s talent.

And last but not least, Salaam.

Octavia McBride-Ahebee, a writer, whose most recent poetry collection, Where My Birthmark Dances, is published by Finishing Line Press, http://www.finishinglinepress.com/

and is available on www.amazon.com

Thinking of Palestine Today !

2011-09-23T10:23:00.000-07:00

Painting by R. Fouda

Suheir Hammand

What I Will
by Suheir Hammad

I will not
dance to your war
drum. I will
not lend my soul nor
my bones to your war
drum. I will
not dance to your
beating. I know that beat.
It is lifeless. I know
intimately that skin
you are hitting. It
was alive once
hunted stolen
stretched. I will
not dance to your drummed
up war. I will not pop
spin beak for you. I
will not hate for you or
even hate you. I will
not kill for you. Especially
I will not die
for you. I will not mourn
the dead with murder nor
suicide. I will not side
with you nor dance to bombs
because everyone else is
dancing. Everyone can be
wrong. Life is a right not
collateral or casual. I
will not forget where
I come from. I
will craft my own drum. Gather my beloved
near and our chanting
will be dancing. Our
humming will be drumming. I
will not be played. I
will not lend my name
nor my rhythm to your
beat. I will dance
and resist and dance and
persist and dance. This heartbeat is louder than
death. Your war drum ain’t
louder than this breath.

Where My Birthmark Dances is Now Available on Amazon !!!

2011-09-20T17:38:00.000-07:00

There are no excuses. You can now purchase my newest collection of poetry, Where My Birthmark Dances, on Amazon.

I have been earnestly preparing for my blog tour and, in this process, I have discovered many phenomenal folks, who are busy making their art and other projects happen. What’s been most exciting and satisfying are the connections I am making around the world. Through my guest posts, you’ll meet them as well. Until then, go buy my book. Love ya.

Celebrating a Birthday with Concha Buika

2011-09-15T07:12:00.000-07:00

Today’s my father’s 80^th birthday. I am sharing with you my grand gift to him- Buika. Her parents are from Equatorial Guinea and she grew up in Spain and you can hear the whole world calling in her voice. What a sound. Enjoy.

Buika with Javier Limon

Reinventing Our Imaginations

2011-07-09T08:09:00.000-07:00

Howard French was the New York Times bureau chief for West and Central Africa during a period of time when I lived in Cote d’Ivoire, where he was based. His coverage of issues and conflicts concerning the African continent had always been thoughtful, complex and demanded a measure of focused participation from his readers. His recent comments about the coverage of the rape crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo affirmed my own frustration about the lack of concern for the millions of Congolese who have been killed because of a variety of complex causes that stem, to a significant degree, from DRC’s relationship with Europe and the United States.

I just completed a series of poems about DRC- its history, its people, its music and its incredibly big heart. I urge you to listen to and look at the three, short videos below. One is of Howard French speaking of how we engage with Africa and the others are videos of The Kinshasa Symphony. This orchestra is a symbol for me of everything I love about the vastness of the African continent; its boundless energy, its resourcefulness and its resilient streak.

Afghanistan, Women and the Problem of Self-Immolation

2011-05-13T20:26:00.000-07:00

My dad often said, if you want to know about a people, read their poets. This month, Words without Borders introduces its readers to some phenomenal writers from Afghanistan. These writers provide for us an intimate look inside a country most of us know only from news sound bites, war correspondents and politicians with agendas. This special issue offers us an opportunity to see Afghanistan as a society that this complex, nuanced and worthy of being understood on its own terms.

http://wordswithoutborders.org/

Mahatma Gandhi said, “If we are to reach real peace in this world… we shall have to begin with children.” Last year, the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, organized an exceptional and unparalleled project. Working with a select set of high school students from a local school in Philadelphia and a set of students from a school in Kubal, Afghanistan, the center prepared students to document, using a camera, their everyday lives. Both groups came together in Philadelphia to meet each other and to select the photographs that would comprise the exhibition “We the People; Afghanistan, America and the Minority Imprint.”
For more about this project and to see some of the photographs, click the following link to Sojo’s Trumpet.
http://trumpetworld.blogspot.com/2010/08/us-afghan-students-photo-exhibition-at.html

Audre Lorde said, “I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.”

My the poem, An Engagement for Burning, which originally appeared in Damazine; A Journal of the Muslim World, and which will be included in my forthcoming collection, Where My Birthmark Dances, is my small attempt to shed light on the growing problem of Afghani women, particularly in the province of Heart, burning themselves- self-immolation.

Here’s a link to a series of news article about this problem.
http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2009/03/17/an-afghan-woman-commits-self-immolation-in-herat.html

An Engagement for Burning

By Octavia McBride-Ahebee

I took her
lamenting
protected
within the boundaries of my burka
buried beneath the world
I took Billie* with me
a haggard chorus of one
a voice tied to silk and twisted hemp
that cut my ears with a melodic charm
her stretched out words
the ones that never stood to be sounded
were an incantation
pouring my despair across a crop
drugged and lying in wait for me
she squeezed herself through an iPod
a euphonious amulet
energized by currents of expectations
a gift given by a visiting girl from the West of Philly
to encourage my heart
a girl who came to Herat
with beaded hair
braided in the shape of a halo
carrying the world in a Wal-Mart duffel bag

we are both Khadeeja
the supposed complement of someone else
she taught her sisters an ambitious grammar
tied to a human history
told through Holiday’s songs
amid the redolence of the musk-scented roses and orange blossoms
in the hall of fields flushed with swaying poppies
poppies naked in their fearless redness
red like the hardened candy apples I lick through my cloth cage
a cage with no delicious opening
for my tongue to peek out
and taste the world.

I will burn myself today
when the sun is its most vain
amid the opulence of candy-colored poppies
between the embrace of voluptuous pining trees
with Billie plugged in my ears.
I will pour from a returnable Coca-Cola bottle
dinner’s petrol
over my whole existence
and wish
that someone
with hands that are enlightened
will rub the sweetness of honey into my wounds.

*Billie Holiday, American jazz singer

Let’s raise up our voices.

Ken Robinson- Why Creativity Matters

2011-05-08T09:48:00.000-07:00

Albert Einstein-Violinist

In addition to courses like Statistics, Economics 101 and Biology, my college freshman roster consisted of courses like The Arts of India, China and the Impact of the Cultural Revolution, a survey course of American Literature, African Dance and a creative writing class. I also continued with my violin instruction. My presence on this elite New England campus was due in large part not only to the college’s financial aid, but also because of the financial contributions of my extended family. Back in those dinosaur years, a student’s selected courses as well as grades were sent directly to parents. When my mother shared my collegiate itinerary with my familial financial investors, many perceived my time spent in any artistic endeavor as an indulgence and a flagrant waste of their financial investment in me. The Arts did not matter.

But my mother, who had taken all of her children to countless music lessons, art classes, dance workshops, and poetry recitals, valued the Arts as a means for instilling strict discipline and for allowing a practitioner to venture on the road of self-discovery. The combination of these two qualities, she often said, equipped one to take on the world. She encouraged me to use the Arts as means of figuring out the world.

As I write this post on this Mother’s Day, my 15 year-old daughter- a musician, writer, dancer, painter-is channeling all of her artistic discipline to create an DNA model for a science class. It is the Arts that will aid all of us in moving our world forward. Albert Einstein, a trained violinist, said it best. “The greatest scientists are artists as well.”

Thanks, Mom!

You have to listen to Ken Robinson, an advisor on arts education, and his enchanting and humorous argument on why The Arts and creativity matter.

Let's Take a Happy Break with Siji From Nigeria

2011-05-05T13:00:00.000-07:00

I love the look and feel of this video. Have fun with Nigerian artist Siji. This song is entitled Ijo.

Geronimo's Code

2011-05-04T12:36:00.000-07:00

Chief Geronimo by Edward R. Curtis

Even my 15-year-old daughter has enough of a sense of history and of herself to know that the U.S. military’s use of the name Geronimo as a code reference for the Osama bin Laden’s execution was offensive and in keeping with the misrepresentation of Native American people. My daughter was curious if the military considered using the name of her namesake-Sojourner Truth. After all, she resisted injustice in the same bold vein as Geronimo.
Geronimo’s birth name was Goyathlay . He lived in what is now New Mexico, but during his time was part of Mexico. It was his fierce response to the attacks perpetrated by Mexican soldiers that earned him the name St. Jerome (Geronimo in Spanish). These soldiers invoked the name of this Roman Catholic saint to protect them against prowess of Goyathlay’s resistance. He would later defend himself and his people from U.S. aggression, though evetually he would be captured and live his life as a prisoner of war until his death in 1909.

( *As an aside, look into the rumor, that has yet to be laid to rest, that Prescott Bush, George W.’s grandfather, stole Geronimo’s skull. …American history? )

Here’s a poem by Renny Golden that I recently discovered.

_____________
Geronimo
By Renny Golden

Words, you Whites, want words.

Nothing, I give you nothing.

Here, stones, the Sierra Madres has

something you can’t use:

the witness of rocks who speak

the language of mountains. We are

this land, stones inside the rain, inside

the mountain which keeps the graves.

Here, Grey Wolf, is another lie, hard

as granite, I give it to you, call it sustenance.

Eat---Why do I give you promise after promise,

rock instead of bread? I want to break your

trust the way Mexicans broke my wife, my mother,

my three babies, their scalps in blood rivers. What

fear can you offer to a dead man? After that

I did not pray…I had no purpose left. I could not

call back my loved ones. I could not bring back

dead Apaches but I could rejoice in …revenge.

So no, I’m not trustworthy. I am wily,

a coyote slipping into shadow. Is it

honor to promise open land and pen us

at San Carlos, that stink hole? See our

lonely ponies, our mountains pouring.

What did you expect…truth? Whose?

Every vow a snakebite; every safe place

a trap. Treachery? Oh, I am a holy trickster,

son of White Painted Woman. I love mescal

which is all I have left of escape, a poison as greedy

as the givers. Mescal… there is something of use.

We are not.

Nawal el Saadawi; Still On Fire

2011-05-04T06:18:00.000-07:00

Nawal el Saadawi

Nawal el Saadawi, Egypt’s feminist firebird, appeared at the Brecht Forum in New York, in March. I so enjoyed listening to her describe not only the recent events in Egypt, but the joy and inspiration she receives from young people. It is this youthful energy and insistence that keeps this octogenarian spirited and focused.

It is imperative that we, on this side of the world, begin to listen directly from other voices that comprise our world. We need no intermediaries, just an open heart and a welcoming mind. Enjoy Nawal.

Here is a link to learn more about Nawal and her literary activism. She appeared at the Brecht Forum as part of a program entitled Revolutionary Women; Dissident Voices from Egypt and Pakistan.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/apr/15/nawal-el-saadawi-egyptian-feminist

Important Links for Where My Birthmark Dances Slideshow

2011-05-02T19:40:00.000-07:00

1. Finishing Line Press- Scroll down author's list which is in alphabetical order and find McBride-Ahebee/ Where My Birthmark Dances and preorder this book .
http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm

2. Music-Rokia Traore- http://www.rokiatraore.net/

3. Ilustrator Robert "Tres" Trujillo- http://investigateconversateillustrate.blogspot.com/

4. Photographer Ed Kashi- http://www.edkashi.com/

Where My Birthmark Dances/ A Slideshow

2011-05-02T19:14:00.000-07:00

Let It Snow

2011-04-26T11:43:00.000-07:00

My brother Ted, as a young boy, had this elaborate ritual of buying 45 rpm records at the end of most weeks. After collecting money from the patrons on his paper route, he would put so much aside for his PSFS savings account, some aside to buy candy from Doc’s and hoagies from George’s and some to get him to the record store on 69^th Street to buy the 45 that everyone wanted. He would dress- gabardine pants and elaborately patterned polyester shirts- for these weekly sojourns to the music mecca up the hill.

Though my dad and his brothers were avid jazz lovers, listeners and collectors, it was Ted who brought into our home what was new and coveted. He-this young boy- also opened our home and hearts to what was quirky and exquisite; he introduced us to Phoebe Snow and to his new practice of buying albums. I can vividly recall most of her album covers and all of the lives I had lived when I listened to her music. She and Janis Ian and Carole King were the first poets I loved.

I saw Phoebe perform years ago, in Philadelphia, at the famed
Chestnut Street
Cabaret and her magic is still with me.

Here’s the link to Inspired Insanity; one of my favorites.

http://www.myspace.com/phoebesnowmusic/music/songs/inspired-insanity-28599361

Tim Hetherington-Bearing Witness

2011-04-20T18:53:00.000-07:00

Broad Street & the Old Executive Grounds ©Tim Hetherington

Wedding Parties at Centennial Pavilion ©Tim Hetherington

When I select a piece of literature- a poem, a short story, a lesson about commas- for my young students and my own children, I do so with the explicit goal of moving them forward on their journey of learning about themselves and their world. I am an ideologue with an agenda; with a passion for people to discover not my truth, but a truth about the underbelly of this fat, beautiful world. And I am most humbled and stripped of all swagger by those who seek not only to discover something new and uncomfortable, but to also bear witness to humanity when it has fallen and crawled into darkness. I am equally awed by those who purposefully seeks to affirm any dignity left standing. This is what photojournalist Tim Hetherington did and this is why his death today in Libya was met with much sadness.

Listen to him and learn how he navigated our perilous place as one who bears witness for us.

Source: New York Times/ June 2, 2009

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/showcase-2/

In Defense of Flowers

By Octavia McBride-Ahebee

When I smell the wind of an AK-47

before it sounds its name

before it travels in rounds of seconds

splintering the thoughts of sterile termites

pushing through the destiny of evil

in search of me

I run to hide in the voluminous fury of a jasmine shrub in bloom

its pale butter blossoms shield me

from the bloodletting

bathing its roots

I snort, in silent gulps, which claim my dignity

the calming splendor of the jasmine’s bouquet

I am rescued

for an instance

from a hunter high

on the dizziness of his own deprivation

I am rescued

from my brother

by a performed bush

Yo-Yo Ma and Charles Riley-Now This is Poetry in Motion!

2011-04-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

Source: ColorLines; News For Action http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/04/love_for_street_dancing_modern_music_and_inner-city_youth.html

by Thoai Lu

Celebrate Love
April 14, 2011

An audience of over 100 grade school students at Los Angeles’s Inner City Arts got a big treat recently when world famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma teamed up with locally-based dancer Charles Riley for a rendition of “The Dying Swan.” In the performance, Ma uses his high-brow style of performance to provide the soundtrack for Riley’s style of interpretive urban dance. The two offered up their talents in order to highlight the need for more government-sponsored arts programs. You can see the whole thing in the video that’s above.
Ma, a Presidential Media of Freedom Award Recipient, is already world renowned. But LA-based Charles Riley, known by his stage name Lil’ Buck, is just starting to make a name on the national scene. The twenty-two-year old is the 2011 Vail International Dance Festival’s Artist-in-Residence and does a style of dance known as “jookin’”, which originated in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. He also taught the kids how a Michael Jackson-style moonwalk as Ma played Jackson’s “Billie Jean.”

“All the things that they talk about these days, with where our country is going — we need an innovative and knowledge work force,” Ma told Southern California Public Radio. “The best way to build innovation and creative imagination - and the most efficient way to do it - is actually by movement, visualizing, sound.”

“We can build community like nothing else,” Ma continued. “All it takes is imagination, attention and empathy — that we care.”

We’re ending the day as often as possible by celebrating love. We welcome your ideas for posts. Send suggestions to submissions@colorlines.com, and be sure to put Celebrate Love in the subject line. You can send links to videos, graphics, photos, quotes, whatever. Or just chime in to the comments below and we’ll find you. Be sure to let us know you’ve got the rights to share any media you send.

To see other Love posts visit our Celebrate Love page.

I Art Woodstock

2011-04-12T10:10:00.000-07:00

This is the latest Visual Art video from Makulu Visual Arts. Shot and edited by Rowan Pybus it is an attempt to capture a slice of life in a corner of Woodstock in Cape Town while it was transformed through a massive mural campaign by some of the best street artists in South Africa.

Here is a poem by Sri Chinmoy on the redemptive qualities of Art.

Art

By Sri Chinmoy

My Art is no art
Without my mind's simplicity.

My Art does not want
To subscribe to the view
That unhappiness
Commands the world.

When I paint or draw,
I keep my mind's thought-garden
Completely free of self-doubt-weeds.

My Art is the hide-and-seek
Between my soul's illumining smiles
And my heart's streaming tears.

The Artist in me has three
Faithful, sleepless
And self-giving friends:
A newness-eye, a oneness-heart
And a fulness-life.

The heart of my Art
And the heart of a child
Are extremely fond of each other.
They love each other deeply;
They need each other constantly;
They are interdependent, sleeplessly.

My mind says that anything I do
Is too insignificant
Because I am wanting
In qualification.
Needless to say,
This includes my Artwork.

My heart says that anything I do
Is too significant
Because the God-Touch
Is always there.
Needless to say,
This includes my Artwork.

The moment I start painting,
I clearly see my soul-meditation
Is blessingfully clasping
My heart-aspiration-flames.

First things first:
The Artist in me,
Before embarking on his Artwork,
Invariably catches
His heart's aspiration-express.

True, in my Art I want to see
The face of earth's beauty.
But I want to see
The heart of Heaven's Divinity
More, infinitely more.

Siba N. Grovogui- How We Step into the World

2011-04-06T08:49:00.000-07:00

Siba N. Grovogui of John Hopkins University

When my daughter was in middle school, she had a history project in which she had to create a poster presenting some aspect of the Renaissance Period. She produced a compelling piece entitled The Renaissance Through African Eyes. She depicted, through Renaissance paintings, the presence of Africans in Europe, but more importantly she illustrated the commercial link between Europe and Africa and how this trade contributed to funding Europe’s enlightenment. The teacher was a bit confused as were her peers, especially students of color. What did Africans have to do with the Renaissance? Did African people even exist then? Didn’t they just miraculously appear on the plantations of the New World just in time to harvest the crops?

This proclivity of marginalizing people and their place in world history is a hallmark of how history is delivered in American academic institutions. This is why I find Professor Siba N. Grovogui, of John Hopkins University, so refreshing and why his ideas need to be disseminated and considered. Like my daughter, he is West African-she from Cote d’Ivoire and he from Guinea, and I am so excited by both of their thoughtfulness.

Here is a video of Grovogui sharing some of his ideas. Have a listen and stretch your mind.

Where My Birthmark Dances by Octavia McBride-Ahebee

2011-04-02T20:43:00.000-07:00

My new poetry collection, Where My Birthmark Dances, is now available for purchase. This book is published by Finishing Line Press. The shipping date is July 23, 2011. Please support me now and buy my book. I will keep you informed of the book release party as well as my upcoming readings. You may click here to purchase the book: http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm

Lillian Dunn,editor of Apiary Journal, in describing this collection states:

The Ancient Romans used to call a person's creative spirit her "genius," and recognized the labor of setting it free as one of love and sacrifice. Octavia McBride-Ahebee's latest collection is just such a labor. Her poems depict human longing, love and dignity in the context of global inequality with fierce, uncompromising grace. As her characters speak, she creates indelible sensory images of loveliness and affection, profound misery and anger, letting each co-exist on the page. The resulting complexity of tone makes space for nuanced and compelling human voices that might otherwise be categorized as "victims" or "villains" of oppression. It takes the full use of genius to notice and capture these contradictions, and a deep social conscience to care so passionately about writing them down. This collection is one of McBride-Ahebee's "bighearted magnolia trees," its trunk scarred by the fire of sacrifice, its blossoms and branches so beautiful you don't want to leave their shade.

Toward A Secret Sky-Poetry at Giovanni's Room

2011-03-23T10:49:00.000-07:00

Octavia McBride-Ahebee

Last month, I read at the famed Giovanni’s Room along with some other fabulous poets. This Light and Honey Reading Series was sponsored by Apiary. Do look for my newest collection of poetry-Where My Birthmark Dances-which is due out in July and will be published by Finishing Line Press.

Warren Longmire

Rachna Vohra

J. Mase III

Apiary Literary Journal: http://theapiarycorp.com/

Finishing Line Press: http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm

These photos are from the Light and Honey event-Toward A Secret Sky.

Hello, America...My Name is Jimmy Baldwin

2010-08-25T14:41:00.000-07:00

Even before I read Sonny’s Blues in my 9th grade English class with Mr. Ronald James, I had met James Baldwin many times before. Not in person, mind you, but his intellect, his passion and his uncompromising commitment to social justice were a palpable presence in my home and many others. There was a time, in the African-American community, regardless of class or level of formal education, when we knew our literary writers, our public philosophers and the platforms of our political leaders.

My father thought Baldwin’s short stories and novels conveyed too much anger. My mother, an avid collector of his essays, thought his tone, insight and activism brilliantly matched the monsters he battled. And my Aunt Sarah, an energetic theatre supporter, thought his plays were honest, dark, and, too often, underrated. Between the dissonance of everyday challenges, my home was filled with the glorious dissonance of words on a mission, of competing ideologies and of the faith placed in ideas and action. James Baldwin was, on many occasions, in the center of this.

I finally did reap the privilege of meeting James Baldwin, almost thirty years ago at Williams College. He not only met with the college community as a whole, but he met with a small group of African-American students as well. I literally sat, along with Dale and Herve, at his feet in Dodd House and I knew immediately I was in familiar company.

I cannot accurately capture the magnitude of James Baldwin’s genius. I can offer this suggestion, which is a grand one. Read his The Price of the Ticket; Collected NonFiction, 1948-1985 , which is filled with his singular, exacting analysis. You will appreciate, too, why he is, indeed, one of the world’s preeminent essayists.

Hello, America…My Name is Jimmy Baldwin is a play by Robert H. Miller that I will see tonight with my daughter and son. I am hoping Mr. Miller delivers on rendering just a glimmer of Baldwin’s magnificence to my children.

Hello, America…My Name is Jimmy Baldwin runs tonight at
The Moonstone Arts Center
110A S. 13 Street( on 13th, between Chestnut and Sansom Sts.)
Philadelphia, PA
215-735-9600
www.moonstoneartscenter.org

*Drawing by France Belleville

Cote d'Ivoire Turns 50-How Do We Celebrate ?

2010-08-09T09:07:00.000-07:00

Cote d’Ivoire was my home for nine years. I married a wonderful man from there, had my babies there and lived a life where each moment was well spent. I share with you this article by Siddhartha Mitter because I like his take and tone in how he tries to convey the situation of Cote d’Ivoire today. Happy Birthday, Cote d’Ivoire !

Independence
By Siddhartha Mitter/Auguste 9, 2010
Source-Africa is a Country

By Paul Sika

“I’ve kept some distance from the 50th anniversary,” my friend says, “because I’m being doubted.” A few days ago he went online to check his voter eligibility status. My friend was born in Côte d’Ivoire and has always been Ivorian, nothing else. He travels back to Côte d’Ivoire for Christmas or, recently, to bury his parents, on his valid Ivorian passport. One would think this made him eligible to vote, but the voter rolls are the domain of a different agency. For more than a decade people from the north of the country, or whose last name suggests they might be from the north, have had trouble getting registered to vote. My friend is from the north. Several times in the past few years he has come to the consulate in New York armed with his passport, his old identity cards, various notarized statements, to make his case to the election officers who have deployed across the country and its diaspora. Now the file status gets posted online but the process behind it is as murky as ever. This time my friend found his name on the latest provisional voter list, subject to some unspecified further confirmation. This is better than last year, when his application was turned down. Being of a stubborn nature, my friend took the time to press his case. Many others didn’t bother.

Now Côte d’Ivoire is turning 50 — it became independent on August 7, 1960 — and my friend, whom any African would recognize as obviously Ivorian by accent, physiognomy, body language, tastes and sense of humor, doesn’t feel eager to celebrate. His friend Auguste has been pressing the gang to gather but it won’t be an independence party as much as a summer gathering of the old crew. Most of them have been in the United States for a decade or more, and with families and jobs and moves they don’t see each other as often as they’d like. Many are still in the northeast but others have moved to Atlanta, to big houses with dens and decks and finished basements in diverse suburbs with good schools. Some are Americans now, so the question of voting back home no longer applies. Among the crew, arguments about origins and national status briefly simmered ten years ago but never stuck. After the 2002 civil war left the country split in two, with a dysfunctional national unity government of southern loyalists and northern rebels, those with close ties back home positioned themselves as they saw fit, supporting one or another party or claiming indifference. Since the elections were due in 2005 but have been postponed over and over ever since, any differences of political opinion have long given way to the general lassitude. In Côte d’Ivoire the government loyalists and former rebels have gained so much material advantage from the status quo that both are happy to prolong the procedural farce that results in voter rolls that are never finalized and election logistics that are never quite ready. The two big opposition parties, which emerged from the old ruling party that oversaw Côte d’Ivoire’s prosperity in the 1970s, are on the outside looking in. My friend and his crew grew up in that old order, got good educations and started careers as engineers and accountants just as things were falling apart. They left before things got worse. Those who stay involved don’t let the politics get in their way, and certainly not alter their friendships.

Lately, many in the crew have been spending more time in Côte d’Ivoire, some to pursue opportunities in the fluid economic situation there, others because their US immigration status is resolved and they can travel back and forth without anxiety. While Abidjan celebrates independence, a bunch will get together in Bassam, the old colonial capital and beach town that is just an hour’s drive down a long seaside road through the coconut palms, lined with small resorts and outdoor bars with thatched cabanas. Bassam has become a gathering place for the crew ever since one of them, the one from New Jersey who cast his lot early on with the president’s party, landed a sinecure as head of a future free-trade zone in Bassam that no one seems actually interested in implementing. With an office and car and nice house and so little to do that he’s uncomfortable — he’s a finagler, but he’s not lazy — he has welcomed his friends for open-ended visits, a kind of decompression chamber between their American lives and the needs of their extended families in Abidjan and the village, the sick relatives and funerals and nephews and nieces who need school fees and uniforms and sponsorship for foreign universities, since the local one barely functions anymore. In Bassam they are taking care of each other as well. The one who lives in the South Bronx, in a grimy apartment in a building with fights outside and chicken bones strewn in the stairwell, has been camped out in Bassam for months. He’s Muslim and doesn’t drink, and he’s enlisted the others in long, daily power-walks on the beach, a group of men in their late forties getting fit American-style, startling the vendors and the prostitutes.

They’re in Bassam now, those ones and the one from Atlanta who hosted the big New Years’ bash, and the one who came all the way from Abidjan to that party and then nearly got killed in the Haiti earthquake when he went to visit friends in the Ivorian UN contingent there, and others too. They send my friend text messages. He’ll be with the northeastern crowd at Auguste and Christine’s — they’ve moved out of Mattapan and into one of the suburbs behind Quincy. They won’t ignore the 50th anniversary of independence, but they won’t really observe it, either. “The Dioula have this expression,” my friend says. “Ton dougou, c’est là où c’est bon pour toi. Wherever things are going well for you, that’s your village.”

What's Your Take On To Kill A Mockingbird ?

2010-07-30T18:37:00.000-07:00

Last August, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an essay, for the New Yorker, about this iconic book. I’m amazed at how people’s take on the book/movie has changed over the years. I’m pleased to hear interpretations that are more complex and honest. I remember clearly reading this book almost 35 years ago, and knowing, both intuitively and experientially as an African-American female teen with a Southern mother who told many stories, that the premise of the book was dishonest and myopic.

Here is a link to Gladwell’s essay.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/10/090810fa_fact_gladwell

And here is a response from my little brother, now a middle-aged man, to the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird and his memories of his gut reaction to it, as a young black boy seeing it in the confines of his elite Main Line School.

I first saw this movie when I was at Waldron Academy. I was the only black person in the room. I've never liked this movie. Ever! I saw in it ,even then, everything that was wrong not just with movies, but with America in general. I told you long ago what was wrong with this film. The article touches on a lot of what I said. The novel itself could not follow it's own implications. Making the Boo Radley character the "Mockingbird" was a patent sellout. The obvious "Mockingbird" was Tom Robinson. The sheriff (and presumably everyone else in the country) does not mind having a dead black man on their conscience. But their sensibilities can't bear to have the sequestered life of the town recluse disturbed. "That would be like killing a mockingbird," says the son at the end of the film. They can't bend the racist protocols of their society to let an obviously innocent black man go free. But obstruction of justice is morally appropriate in the case of Boo Radleys all over America. America has been grounded in bullshit from the beginning; in politics; in business; in sports; in journalism; in everything. It is unrealistic to think that what passes for cinema in this country should be any different.

-J.M

*Drawing of Mockingbird by Andrew Saeger

Why Schools Don't Educate- John Taylor Gatto

2010-07-20T19:36:00.000-07:00

The following in a long and weighty essay, so I’ll spare you my introductory musings. Wow! That is, very much present tense, my reaction to this speech, which was delivered by John Taylor Gatto in 1990, after he was selected New York City’s Teacher of the Year. As I am preparing for the new school year as a parent, teacher and writer, I am encouraged and delighted and emboldened by Mr. Gatto’s insights.
Source: The Sun Magazine www.thesunmagazine.com
Painting by Paula O’Brien www.paulaobrien.com

Why Schools Don't Educate
By John Taylor Gatto

I ACCEPT THIS award on behalf of all the fine teachers I’ve known over the years who’ve struggled to make their transactions with children honorable ones: men and women who are never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine endlessly what the word education should mean. A “Teacher of the Year” is not the best teacher around — those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered — but a standard-bearer, symbolic of these private people who spend their lives gladly in the service of children. This is their award as well as mine.

We live in a time of great social crisis. Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing, and arithmetic. The world’s narcotic economy is based upon our own consumption of this commodity. If we didn’t buy so many powdered dreams, the business would collapse — and schools are an important sales outlet. Our teenage-suicide rate is the highest in the world — and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not poor. In Manhattan, 70 percent of all new marriages last less than five years.

Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to an unprecedented degree; nobody talks to them anymore. Without children and old people mixing in daily life, a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the term “community” hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way, school is a major actor in this tragedy, just as it is a major actor in the widening gulfs among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism, we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the streets.

I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-nine years of teaching — that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes, or politicians in civics classes, or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me, because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic; it has no conscience. It rings a bell, and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell, where he learns that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

OUR FORM of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts, from around 1850. It was resisted — sometimes with guns — by an estimated 80 percent of the Massachusetts population, with the last outpost, in Barnstable on Cape Cod, not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by the militia and the children marched to school under guard.

Now, here is a curious idea to ponder: Senator Ted Kennedy’s office released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was 98 percent, and after it the figure never again climbed above 91 percent, where it stands in 1990. I hope that interests you.

Here is another curiosity to think about: The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where 1.5 million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents. Last month the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at home seem to be five, or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.

I don’t think we’ll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we’re going to change what’s rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the institution “schools” very well, but it does not “educate”; that’s inherent in the design of the thing. It’s not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It’s just impossible for education and schooling to be the same thing.

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnas Sears and W.R. Harper of the University of Chicago and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College and other to be instruments for the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

To a very great extent, schools succeed in doing this. But our society is disintegrating, and in such a society, the only successful people are self-reliant, confident, and individualistic — because the community life that protects the dependent and weak is dead. The products of schooling are, as I’ve said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal, but as human beings they are useless — useless to others and useless to themselves.

The daily misery around us is, I think, in large measure caused by the fact that — as social critic Paul Goodman put it thirty years ago — we force children to grow up absurd. Any reform in schooling has to deal with school’s absurdities.

It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with only people of exactly the same age and social class. The system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety. It cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present, much the same way television does.

It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.

It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your youth, in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home, demanding that you do its “homework.”

“How will they learn to read?” you say, and my answer is: “Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.” When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks, they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the life that unfolds around them.

But keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes, or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers; we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most, and so our children talk constantly, following the public models of television and schoolteachers. It is very difficult to teach “the basics” anymore, because they really aren’t basic to the society we’ve made strong.

TWO INSTITUTIONS at present control our children’s lives: television and schooling, in that order. Both reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, nonstop abstraction. In centuries past, the time of a child or adolescent would be occupied in real work, real charity, real adventure, and the real search for mentors who might teach what he or she really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to becoming a whole man or woman.

But here is the calculus of time the children I teach must deal with:

Out of the one hundred sixty-eight hours in each week, my children sleep fifty-six. That leaves them one hundred twelve hours a week out of which to fashion a self.

My children watch fifty-five hours of television a week, according to recent reports. That leaves them fifty-seven hours a week in which to grow up.

My children attend school thirty hours a week, use about eight hours getting ready, going, and coming home, and spend an average of seven hours a week on homework — a total of forty-five hours. During that time they are under constant surveillance, have no private time or private space, and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves twelve hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course my kids eat, too, and that takes some time — not much, though, because we’ve lost the tradition of family dining. If we allot three hours a week to evening meals, we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of nine hours.

It’s not enough. It’s not enough, is it? The richer the kid, of course, the less television he or she watches, but the rich kid’s time is just as narrowly circumscribed by a broader catalog of commercial entertainments and his or her inevitable assignment to a series of private lessons in areas seldom of the child’s own choice.

And these things are, oddly enough, just a more cosmetic way to create dependent human beings, unable to fill their own hours, unable to give substance and pleasure to their existence. It’s a national disease, this dependency and aimlessness, and I think schooling and television and lessons have a lot to do with it.

Think of the things that are killing us as a nation: drugs, brainless competition, recreational sex, gambling, alcohol, the pornography of violence, and the worst pornography of all: lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as a philosophy. All are addictions of dependent personalities, and that is what our brand of schooling must inevitably produce.

I WANT TO tell you what the effect is on children of taking all their time — time they need to grow up — and forcing them to spend it on abstractions. No reform that doesn’t attack these specific pathologies will be anything more than a facade.
1. The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants to grow up these days, and who can blame them? Toys are us.

2. The children I teach have almost no curiosity, and what little they do have is transitory; they cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection between the bells ringing again and again to change classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?

3. The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. They live in a continuous present; the exact moment they are in is the boundary of their consciousness.

4. The children I teach are ahistorical; they have no sense of how the past has predestined their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.

5. The children I teach are cruel to each other; they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, and they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.

6. The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. They cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret self inside an outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be, the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy, so intimate relationships have to be avoided.

7. The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically “grade” everything — and television mentors who offer everything in the world for sale.

8. The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This timidity is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness, but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.

I could name a few other conditions that school reform will have to tackle if our national decline is to be arrested, but by now you will have grasped my thesis, whether you agree with it or not. Either schools, television, or both have caused these pathologies. It’s a simple matter of arithmetic: between schooling and television, all the time children have is eaten up. That’s what has destroyed the American family; it is no longer a factor in the education of its own children.

WHAT CAN be done?

First, we need a ferocious national debate that doesn’t quit, day after day, year after year, the kind of continuous emphasis that journalism finds boring. We need to scream and argue about this school thing until it is fixed or broken beyond repair — one or the other. If we can fix it, fine; if we cannot, then the success of home schooling shows a different road that has great promise. Pouring the money back into family education might kill two birds with one stone, repairing families as it repairs children.

Genuine reform is possible, but it shouldn’t cost anything. We need to rethink the fundamental premises of schooling and decide what it is we want all children to learn, and why. For 140 years this nation has tried to impose objectives from a lofty command center made up of “experts,” a central elite of social engineers. It hasn’t worked. It won’t work. It is a gross betrayal of the democratic promise that once made this nation a noble experiment. The Russian attempt to control Eastern Europe has exploded before our eyes. Our own attempt to impose the same sort of central orthodoxy, using the schools as an instrument, is also coming apart at the seams, albeit more slowly and painfully. It doesn’t work because its fundamental premises are mechanical, antihuman, and hostile to family life. Lives can be controlled by machine education, but they will always fight back with weapons of social pathology — drugs, violence, self-destruction, indifference, and the symptoms I see in the children I teach.

It’s high time we looked backward to regain an educational philosophy that works. One I like particularly well has been a favorite of the ruling classes of Europe for thousands of years. I think it works just as well for poor children as for rich ones. I use as much of it as I can manage in my own teaching — as much, that is, as I can get away with, given the present institution of compulsory schooling.

At the core of this elite system of education is the belief that self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge. Everywhere in this system, at every age, you will find arrangements that place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem is fraught with great risks, such as the problem of getting a horse to gallop or making it jump. But that, of course, is a problem successfully solved by thousands of elite children before the age of ten. Can you imagine anyone who has mastered such a challenge ever lacking confidence in his or her ability to do anything? Sometimes the problem is that of mastering solitude, as Thoreau did at Walden Pond, or Einstein did in the Swiss customshouse.

One of my former students, Roland Legiardi-Laura, though both his parents were dead and he had no inheritance, rode a bicycle across the U.S. alone when he was hardly out of boyhood. Is it any wonder that in manhood he made a film about Nicaragua, although he had no money and no prior experience with filmmaking, and that it was an international award winner — even though his regular work was as a carpenter?

Right now we are taking from our children the time they need to develop self-knowledge. That has to stop. We have to invent school experiences that give a lot of that time back. We need to trust children from a very early age with independent study, perhaps arranged in school, but which takes place away from the institutional setting. We need to invent a curriculum where each kid has a chance to develop uniqueness and self-reliance.

A short time ago, I paid seventy dollars and sent a twelve-year-old girl with her non-English-speaking mother on a bus down the New Jersey coast. She took the police chief of Sea Bright to lunch and apologized for polluting his beach with a discarded Gatorade bottle. In exchange for this public apology, I had arranged for the girl to have a one-day apprenticeship in small-town police procedures. A few days later, two more of my twelve-year-old kids traveled alone from Harlem to West Thirty first Street, where they began apprenticeships with a newspaper editor. Next week, three of my kids will find themselves in the middle of the Jersey swamps at six in the morning studying the mind of a trucking-company president as he dispatches eighteen-wheelers to Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Are these “special” children in a “special” program? No, they’re just nice kids from central Harlem, bright and alert, but so badly schooled when they came to me that most of them couldn’t add or subtract with any fluency. And not a single one knew the population of New York City, or how far it is from New York to California.

Does that worry me? Of course. But I am confident that as they gain self-knowledge, they’ll also become self-teachers — and only self-teaching has any lasting value.

We’ve got to give kids independent time right away, because that is the key to self-knowledge, and we must reinvolve them with the real world as fast as possible so that the independent time can be spent on something other than mere abstractions. This is an emergency. It requires drastic action to correct. Our children are dying like flies in our schools. Good schooling or bad schooling, it’s all the same: irrelevant.

WHAT ELSE DOES a restructured school system need? It needs to stop being a parasite on the working community. I think we need to make community service a required part of schooling. It is the quickest way to give young children real responsibility.

For five years I ran a guerrilla school program where I had every kid, rich and poor, smart and dipsy, give 320 hours a year of hard community service. Dozens of those kids came back to me years later and told me that this one experience had changed their lives, had taught them to see in new ways, to rethink goals and values. It happened when they were thirteen, in my Lab School program — made possible only because my rich school district was in chaos. When “stability” returned, the lab closed. It was too successful, at too small a cost, to be allowed to continue; we made the expensive, elite programs look bad.

There is no shortage of real problems in this city. Kids can be asked to help solve them in exchange for the respect and attention of the adult world. Good for kids, good for the rest of us.

Independent study, community service, adventures in experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships — these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force the idea of “school” open — to include family as the main engine of education. The Swedes realized this in 1976, when they effectively abandoned state adoption of unwanted children and instead spent national time and treasure on reinforcing the family so that children born to Swedes were wanted. They reduced the number of unwanted Swedish children from six thousand in 1976 to fifteen in 1986. So it can be done. The Swedes just got tired of paying for the social wreckage caused by children not being raised by their natural parents, so they did something about it. We can, too.

Family is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents — and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 — we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.

The curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life. We’ve gotten away from that curriculum — it’s time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during school time confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds. That was my real purpose in sending the girl and her mother down the Jersey coast to meet the police chief.

I have many ideas on how to make a family curriculum, and my guess is that a lot of you will have many ideas, too, once you begin to think about it. Our greatest problem in getting the kind of grass-roots thinking going that could reform schooling is that we have large, vested interests profiting from schooling just exactly as it is, despite rhetoric to the contrary.

We have to demand that new voices and new ideas get a hearing, my ideas and yours. We’ve all had a bellyful of authorized voices on television and in the press. A decade-long, free-for-all debate is called for now, not more “expert” opinions. Experts in education have never been right; their “solutions” are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. Enough.

Time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family.

I’ve said my piece. Thank you.

Garrison Keillor's When Everyone's A Writer, No One Is

2010-07-15T10:55:00.000-07:00

I admire the energy and insistence and irreverence of young people. I have a teenage daughter who has literary aspirations and who remains continually baffled by me and my circle of writer friends who wait-outrageously long waits-for some entity, usually a white, male gatekeeper, to validate our writing by publishing it in traditional formats likes books, print magazines, etc.

I love young people because if you listen to them, to their take on the world you inevitably question yourself and your motives and ways of operating. My daughter often raises the point, to me, who, without pretense and ego, am I honestly trying to touch, to commune with, through my writing ? Follow your answer to its source, she says, and cut out that old fuddy-duddy middleman. She does.

My daughter very much identifies with her West African roots. She was born in Cote d’Ivoire and her writing reflects the energy of Africa. There is no woe is me in her work. Her work is celebratory and confrontational. She doesn’t wait to see who likes or gets her work. She creates her own beautifully handmade books and distributes them, free of charge, to African hair-braiding shops, the Liberian-operated water-ice stands, and to my students from Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Togo, Benin, Liberia, Ghana who, now in their new homes, have yet to hear celebratory words about Africa.

A few weeks ago, before she left for a summer program, we went to get water-ice from one of the places she had distributed her poetry books. One of the women, a Liberian, who works there, came out from behind the counter and gave my daughter the biggest and longest bear-hug and said she so enjoyed her poetry. She even shared it with her children. After we returned to our car, my daughter said, without vanity and with confidence, that she had a connection with her audience that was real and growing and she achieved this significant feat without the approval of someone who probably would never get where’s she’s coming from.

I share all of this as an introduction to this piece by Garrison Keillor, which appeared in the Baltimore Sun. What do you think?

When Everyone Is A Writer, No One Is
By Garrison Keillor

In New York the other night, I ran into my daughter’s favorite author, Mary Pope Osborne, whose “Magic Tree House” books I’ve read to the child at night, and a moment later, Scott Turow, who writes legal thrillers that keep people awake all night, and David Remnick, the biographer of President Barack Obama. Bang bang bang, one heavyweight after another. Erica Jong, Jeffrey Toobin, Judy Blume. It was a rooftop party in Tribeca that I got invited to via a well-connected pal, wall-to-wall authors and agents and editors and elegant young women in little black dresses, standing, white wine in hand, looking out across the Hudson at the lights of Hoboken and Jersey City, eating shrimp and scallops and spanikopita on toothpicks, all talking at once the way New Yorkers do.

I grew up on the windswept plains with my nose in a book, so I am awestruck in the presence of book people, even though I have written a couple books myself. These are anti-elitist times, when mobs are calling for the downfall of pointy-head intellectuals who dare tell decent people what to think, but I admire the elite. I’m not one of them — I’m a deadline writer, my car has 150,000 miles on it — but I’m sorry about their downfall. And this book party in Tribeca feels like a Historic Moment, like a 1982 convention of typewriter salesmen or the hunting party of Kaiser Wilhelm II with his coterie of plumed barons in the fall of 1913 before the Great War sent their world spinning off the precipice.

Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numerals (U R 2 1derful), blogging like crazy, reading for hours off their little screens, surfing around from Henry James to Jesse James to the epistle of James to pajamas to Obama to Alabama to Alanon to non-sequiturs, sequins, penguins, penal institutions, and it’s all free, and you read freely, you’re not committed to anything the way you are when you shell out $30 for a book, you’re like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers.

And if you want to write, you just write and publish yourself. No need to ask permission, just open a website. And if you want to write a book, you just write it, send it to Lulu.com or BookSurge at Amazon or PubIt or ExLibris and you’ve got yourself an e-book. No problem. And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75.

Back in the day, we became writers through the laying on of hands. Some teacher who we worshipped touched our shoulder, and this benediction saw us through a hundred defeats. And then an editor smiled on us and wrote us a check, and our babies got shoes. But in the New Era, writers will be self-anointed. No passing of the torch. Just sit down and write the book. And The New York Times, the great brand name of publishing, whose imprimatur you covet for your book (“brilliantly lyrical, edgy, suffused with light” — NY Times) will vanish (Poof!). And editors will vanish.

The upside of self-publishing is that you can write whatever you wish, utter freedom, and that also is the downside. You can write whatever you wish, and everyone in the world can exercise their right to read the first three sentences and delete the rest.

Self-publishing will destroy the aura of martyrdom that writers have enjoyed for centuries. Tortured geniuses, rejected by publishers, etc., etc. If you publish yourself, this doesn’t work anymore, alas.

Children, I am an author who used to type a book manuscript on a manual typewriter. Yes, I did. And mailed it to a New York publisher in a big manila envelope with actual postage stamps on it. And kept a carbon copy for myself. I waited for a month or so and then got an acceptance letter in the mail. It was typed on paper. They offered to pay me a large sum of money. I read it over and over and ran up and down the rows of corn whooping. It was beautiful, the Old Era. I’m sorry you missed it.

Garrison Keillor’s column appears regularly in The Baltimore Sun.

Source:
When everyone’s a writer, no one is
In a world where everything’s free on the web, what will happen to publishing
Garrison Keillor
Baltimore Sun May 25, 2010

INTERVIEW: Ben Okri: My Family Values

2010-07-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

*Source-The Guardian

Ben Okri, Photograph by John Alex Maguire

My father brought back from England an extraordinary collection of books. He came to London [from Nigeria] to train as a lawyer and my mother brought me (aged one-and-a-half) a year later and we stayed for about six years. His plan was that back in Nigeria he would have time to read all these books: the classics – Homer, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky – and the great books on economics and philosophy. But he got carried away with being a successful young lawyer and didn't get round to reading them. They gathered dust, and every now and then he'd say to me, "Ben, dust the books – but don't read them!" That made the books fantastically attractive. I don't know if he did it on purpose. I wouldn't put it past him. I would sit on the floor cross-legged dusting a Dickens or Shakespeare, then I'd read for hours until I'd hear his voice, "Ben, what are you doing?" and I'd start dusting again. Books still have this tension for me – the do and don't, the possibility of danger, of secret knowledge. It makes them very potent.

My mum, Grace, was quite different. She was gentle and very tough at the same time, and she never told me things directly. She never said "don't … " – she knew that would make me do whatever it was. Instead, she would tell me a story. There were no clear morals, but her stories had an air around them. They were telling you something, and you had to work out what. Some took me 20 years to get.

Her mother died when she was just three or four, and she was shifted around between aunts. She knew what it was like to grow up unprotected – that raw King Lear condition with nothing between you and the cold winds of the world. It made her very sensitive to other people's sufferings. She would say to me, "I can live next door to a hungry lion." She meant she could get along with all types and bear their awkwardness and nastiness. I can't live up to that.

When we got back to Nigeria (when I was about seven) we moved around a lot. That came to a stop with the civil war. My mother was half Igbo [from the south-east of Nigeria] while my father was Urhobo, from the Delta region, so the war was a family thing. We spent a lot of time hiding Mum – and I nearly got killed. I'm still stunned by what people are able to do to their neighbours.

One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We had a bit of a rollercoaster life with some really challenging financial periods. He was always unshaken, completely tranquil, the same ebullient, laughing, jovial man. I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again.It's what life does.

My parents lived to see their unruly child come through and win the Booker prize, but one day in my 30s, I got this impossible call from Nigeria to say that my mother had gone. We never think that our mothers will die. It was like suddenly an abyss opened at my feet – I was standing on nothing. It was the strangest thing. Her passing away ripped the solidity out of the world. For a few weeks, I'd be walking along and suddenly I'd be unable to stand straight and I'd hold on to a lamppost and find the lamppost wasn't solid either. That was a turning point for me. It began a great journey. I don't feel I need to lean on lampposts any more. You need internal lampposts – and a few good friends.

Ben Okri's latest book, Tales of Freedom, is published by Rider Books.
http://www.guardian.co.uk

Unearthing the Real Passion Behind 2010 World Cup Games

2010-07-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

As all eyes turn toward South Africa and the 2010 World Cup, Chimurenga and the Chinua Achebe Center have sent fourteen prominent writers, among them Chris Abani and Alain Mabanckou, on a guided pilgrimage to thirteen cities in Africa (and Salvador do Bahia). Their experiences will be published as travelogues.

Here is a post by Nigerian writer Chris Abani:

For Chris Akunda
Posted by Chris Abani on 3 July 2010

The light is brittle from the floodlights, the night colder than any African night should be, the Vuvuzelas are blaring at full volume, and Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg is a riot of color as the fans arrive giving the stands the look of a bedazzled sweater. The game is the US versus Slovenia and the South African fans are torn between supporting the USA, who they love and Slovenia who are the underdogs in the game.
Seated in the stands among the screaming fans is Eric Akunda a Kenya-born US citizen. Like so many fans from around the world, Eric has come to watch the world cup, but unlike many of the other fans, he is on a special mission. He is here to make his son’s dreams come true in a most unusual but heartbreakingly beautiful way.

Chris Akunda, Eric’s son, was not only a devoted fan of the game who had been saving up for a long time to come to the world cup with his father. Chris played soccer too, and spent hours on YouTube watching clips of soccer games from all over the world, looking for what he described as, “sick moves to put on his opponents during games.” Chris played soccer diligently, and when not on the actual field, or on YouTube soaking up moves, he played Playstation FIFA World Cup games.
He was a 7th grader at Hamilton Southeastern Junior High in Indiana and he excelled at school, math and a love of writing standing shoulder to shoulder with his love for soccer. But he also played basketball and the piano. A member of the Fishers Soccer Club, a non-profit that funded a league for under 13 players across the United States, Chris was also part of the Indiana Soccer Olympic Development Program since he was nine, having started playing soccer at four.

Chris had been playing in the Coca Cola Classic Soccer Tournament in Greenwood Indiana on the 6th of June, when he collapsed on the field, and was taken to the ER. He died some hours later from a congenital heart condition that had gone undiagnosed. He was 12.
Soccer was a religion for Chris. He was, as his father Eric told me, a crazy soccer fan who understood the game so scientifically and intimately that he had followed soccer players long before they became stars, often predicting to his father who they would become, and every prediction he made about the players who would have career defining moments from Spain, Argentina and even the US are all coming true. His expertise even included a deep knowledge of the referees and who would be a bad draw for a particular team. Every prediction he made for the World Cup as far as best player, highest goal averages, is coming true. It also turns out, Eric tells me, that Chris taught him everything he knew about the current state of the game.

Chris’s parents, Eric and Jacqueline Akunda, who were ardent fans and supporters of their son, took time off work to take him to games and tournaments. And although they didn’t tell me this, I suspect that their decision to give up the safety of paid jobs to begin their own solar energy company might have been partly motivated by the need and desire to give Chris more of their time and attention.
To honor their son’s desire, Eric brought Chris’ cremated remains to South Africa, and he takes Chris’s remains to the games he attends. When I spoke to Eric, he and Chris had been to three games, and intended to go to as many more as he could manage.

With a voice full of grief balanced with a grace I cannot even begin to summon, Eric told me: it was a privilege to have Chris through our lives.

This moving story, in the midst of the world cup controversies and excitements reminded this writer not only of the deeply human aspects to gatherings like this, but of the deep generosity of Africa and her children.

Send your sympathies to Chris Akunda’s family at http://www.chrisakunda.com/

A Brave and Startling Truth by Maya Angelou

2010-07-04T09:25:00.000-07:00

On this Fourth of July, consider this brave and startling truth. Consider it for our nation and the world.
*Picture by Zrayman

A Brave and Startling Truth
By Maya Angelou

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn and scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze
When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse
When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cantankerous words
Which challenge our existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
And without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

Brave New Voices Festival and Conference-Discover the Power of Spoken Word

2010-07-01T14:05:00.000-07:00

Join James Kass, Michelle Lee, Hodari Davis and other Youth Speaks staff for a pedagogical and curricula exploration of the power of spoken word, using the Youth Speaks Methodology in conjunction with the 7-part HBO series Brave New Voices DVD, an electronic teachers guide, and lunch. The Conference will take place in Los Angeles, California on July 24 from 9:00AM to 3:00PM.

About Brave New Voices:

Convening the top young poets and spoken word artists, aged 13-19, from across the United States, Brave New Voices is a one-of-a-kind festival that truly engages everyone involved; from the participants, to the adult mentors and the audience members. Each year, Brave New Voices is held in a different city, highlighting the changing demographics of the country and a new poetic and politic for the 21st Century. The 2010 festival will fun from July 19 through the 24 in Los Angeles, CA.

About Brave New Voices on HBO

All over the United States, a new generation of poets is emerging. This new HBO series captures teenagers picking up the pen and taking hold of the microphone with passion, intelligence, creativity, honesty and power. These voices of 21st Century America transcend race, class, gender, orientation, and red state/blue state politics as they show us all what the next generation of leaders looks and sounds like.

Watch on HBO ON DEMAND

Youth Speaks

Founded in 1996, Youth Speaks Inc. is a multi-faceted organization that understands and believes that the power, insight, creativity, and passion of young people can change the world. Brave New Voices was created by Youth Speaks, Inc in 1998 after the inaugural Youth Speaks Teen Poetry Slam in San Francisco—the first poetry slam dedicated to youth in the nation’s history. To learn more, get involved, and attend other events, visit http://www.youthspeaks.org/ and
http://leewayfoundation.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/brave/

Mona R. Washington Wins Kerouac Residency

2010-07-01T04:10:00.000-07:00

Playwright/Screenwriter Mona R. Washington recently won the coveted Jack Kerouac Writers Project Residency, which consists of a three-month stay in Kerouac’s cottage in Orlando, Florida. Only four residencies are awarded each year to writers of any genre. To learn more about the iconic Jack Kerouac and this prestigious residency, visit http://kerouacproject.org/

Mahmoud Darwish; The Illuminator

2010-06-30T17:04:00.000-07:00

My daughter is now a huge fan of graphic novels. She especially appreciates how this genre can convey weighty topics and current events in a way that is engaging, even for a teenager. She’s completely enraptured by the persona, writing style, graphics and honesty of Marjane Satrapi and her Persepolis series. Iran is now on her radar and she can fluently pronounce its president’s name. Reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus made my daughter face many things, including the motivation for the State of Israel, which is now on her radar.

Before leaving for a summer program, she had started another graphic novel called Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco. She wants to understand the Palestinians. Reading Footnotes in Gaza ,at first, proved a little daunting and at her grandfather’s suggestion she took another path to this understanding; she read the poetry of one of Palestine’s sons- Mahmoud Darwish. I discovered him as well. My daughter feels she is ready to return to Footnotes in Gaza armed with a lot of poetic insight.

Even though August will mark the second anniversary of his death, his poetry continues to illuminate the path to understanding. *Photo by Michael Nye of a Palestinian girl holding her own poem.
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1062

Here is Mahmoud Darwish’s poem-The Prison Cell.

The Prison Cell

It is possible...
It is possible at least sometimes...
It is possible especially now
To ride a horse
Inside a prison cell
And run away...

It is possible for prison walls
To disappear,
For the cell to become a distant land
Without frontiers:

What did you do with the walls?
I gave them back to the rocks.
And what did you do with the ceiling?
I turned it into a saddle.
And your chain?
I turned it into a pencil.

The prison guard got angry.
He put an end to the dialogue.
He said he didn't care for poetry,
And bolted the door of my cell.

He came back to see me
In the morning.
He shouted at me:

Where did all this water come from?
I brought it from the Nile.
And the trees?
From the orchards of Damascus.
And the music?
From my heartbeat.

The prison guard got mad.
He put an end to my dialogue.
He said he didn't like my poetry,
And bolted the door of my cell.

But he returned in the evening:

Where did this moon come from?
From the nights of Baghdad.
And the wine?
From the vineyards of Algiers.
And this freedom?
From the chain you tied me with last night.

The prison guard grew so sad...
He begged me to give him back
His freedom.

— Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

Translated by Ben Bennani

Cliterature- War Issue 2010

2010-06-30T11:51:00.000-07:00

My poem, “Deliver Me From the Hands of Strange Children,” appears in Cliterature’s War-themed issue. Cliterature is an online journal dedicated to women’s sexuality in writing. It publishes both creative and critical works quarterly. This issue, Volume 16, was edited by Lynn Brewer. Here’s the link:
http://www.cliteraturejournal.com/war.html

Lessons Learned in the 'Hood

2009-09-06T11:28:00.000-07:00

When the Dominican-American writer, Junot Diaz, won the Pulitzer Prize last year for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I was thrilled. I’d been a fan of Diaz’s work for years, so I received the announcement of him winning this award as if my own little brother had won. I was proud and elated and I needed to share this news when I first read of his selection in the New York Times.

I am African-American and I live in an almost exclusively African-American neighborhood. Like many neighborhoods similar to my own, the Mom and Pop corner store is now owned and operated by Dominicans. From my observations, there are little substantive exchanges between these two, ethnic groups given the fact that they have frequent encounters with each other. Diaz’s honor that day was one to be shared. I had my daughter take the news article saluting Diaz to our neighborhood Dominican grocers. The husband and wife team who run the store did not know of Junot Diaz, just like my son’s African-American barber does not know of Percival Everett.

But this couple was just as thrilled to learn about Diaz and his triumph. They posted the news clipping in their store and boasted of his literary prowess to their customers. I later gave Ana, the wife, a copy of Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Ana was amazed that a Dominican-American woman was sharing her immigrant experience and that other people were even interested. Ana and her husband have since moved on, but she had begun to keep a journal she simply called her story.

Our city is a veritable hothouse of cultures to learn from and to celebrate. Philadelphia’s Latino community is large and diverse and we should avail ourselves of this phenomenal resource. On September 20, 2009, we have the opportunity to do just that-Feria del Barrio. This neighborhood festival is one of Philadelphia’s largest celebrations of Latino culture and music and it is hosted in the heart of the Latino community. Everyone is invited. To learn more, visit the website of Taller Puertorriqueno
http://www.tallerpr.org/getdoc/bdf65e3a-246d-4205-9cbf-e5728dcea57d/.aspx

Virgins With Rifles; Revisiting Wilfred Owen

2009-09-03T09:18:00.000-07:00

*Discover Cartoonist Hugh Macleod http://www.gaipvoid.com/

I am the queen of Mommy read-alouds, but I also demand that my children read to me. Very recently, my daughter, in a lame attempt to lull me to sleep, read me a poem that so moved her; Dulce et Decorum Est by the English/Welsh poet Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). Needless to say, I sat up and requested a second reading. I am literally crying now as I recall this poem which is about the brutal horrors of war. Owen was not only a master poet in terms of form and content, he was a soldier in the First World War. He seamlessly melded his talent and experience to create a tough, lyrical testimony about war. Take some real time and read Dulce et Decorum Est once and then again and again. Owen was killed in action a week before the war ended.

Listen to Sting’s Children’s Crusade from his Dream of the Blue Turtles album. The lyrics follow Owen’s poem.

Dulce Et Decorum Est
By Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
------------------------------------------

Children's Crusade

By Sting from Dream of the Blue Turtles

Young men, soldiers, Nineteen Fourteen
Marching through countries they'd never seen
Virgins with rifles, a game of charades
All for a Children's Crusade

Pawns in the game are not victims of chance
Strewn on the fields of Belgium and France
Poppies for young men, death's bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed

The children of England would never be slaves
They're trapped on the wire and dying in waves
The flower of England face down in the mud
And stained in the blood of a whole generation

Corpulent generals safe behind lines
History's lessons drowned in red wine
Poppies for young men, death's bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed
All for a Children's Crusade

The children of England would never be slaves
They're trapped on the wire and dying in waves
The flower of England face down in the mud
And stained in the blood of a whole generation

Midnight in Soho, Nineteen Eighty-four
Fixing in doorways, opium slaves
Poppies for young men, such bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed
All for a Children's Crusade

Patrick Awuah; Restoring Our Faith with His Action

2009-08-30T08:54:00.000-07:00

       Last year I won a writing contest sponsored by United Planet, an organization that sends volunteers around the world to work on various social and economic projects. The real outcome of these projects is to foster cross-cultural understanding. My entry for the contest was a poem called Oasis.

      I taught for seven years at The International Community School of Abidjan, an American Embassy -sponsored school in the West African country of Cote d’Ivoire. Prior to Cote d’Ivoire’s civil war, I.C.S.A. had a student body of more than 500 students who represented more than 70 nationalities. What an amazing environment to grow as a teacher and a writer!
      I wrote the poem Oasis as an introduction to a unit study on poetry. I wanted my fourth grade students to recognize and appreciate that understanding poetry requires diligence and many readings. But, I wanted them to approach the task of trying to derive meaning from a poem in spirit of joy and fun. I asked them to imagine themselves as poetry detectives, who were looking for clues that led to meaning. As an introductory activity, I wrote this poem, Oasis. Each day, I would read several stanzas about a particular student and the class would have to reason their way as to what student I was describing. After selecting the student a particular stanza captured, some students illustrated the stanzas. I have included these illustrations as well.
      This poem, these illustrations and The International Community School of Abidjan are testaments that people from different backgrounds, cultures, religions and political views can work together and love each other when such a challenge is presented and then nurtured.
      The students of this fourth grade class are now juniors in college. For many of us, our lives were torn apart by the war in Cote d’Ivoire and necessitated us moving to other places. One of the students involved in this project, who has since relocated to Florida, last year requested from me a copy of the poem and the illustrations. She wanted a tangible complement to her memory of the marvelous life we all had in Cote d’Ivoire because we were, indeed, the world.

       Here is the link to poem Oasis and its illustrations. http://www.unitedplanet.org/documents/OasisbyOctavia_000.pdf

      I share all of this to say that I am so thrilled by the vision and action of many young people, particularly young Africans who recognize that they are the solution to the African continent’s challenges. Such young people remind me so much of my students.
Here is video link to Patrick Awuah,a young man from Ghana, who went to Swarthmore College and then on to a lucrative career with Microsoft. But, after becoming a parent, he became more ambitious in his expectations and faith for Ghana. He returned home and founded Ashesi University, an oasis where progressive and ethical leaders are being groomed. Listen and have your faith restored.

http://www.ted.com/talks/patrick_awuah_on_educating_leaders.html

Mona R. Washington-Provincetown; An Essay on Race and Gender

2009-08-29T17:12:00.000-07:00

*Last summer, Ms. Washington and I were fortunate enough to take a workshop at the renowned Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. The following essay, which originally appeared in the North Star News, was inspired by Ms. Washington’s observations of Provincetown; a very unique arts colony and gay summer retreat. To read this essay in its entirety, click on the North Star News link below.

Provincetown is about the only place I’ll buy a white man a drink.

I need a break after my writing workshop, so Monday night I go to a drag show with my friend Octavia, and we’re standing in line. Early. Too early she says. We’re second. She wants a soda or something, so we flag down this cute brother who’s working there and he says stay in line because the rush is about to start. Sure enough twenty-five white guys get in line within the next five minutes. Then more, and more, until there’s a line out to Commercial Street.

I turn to Octavia and smugly say, “Aren’t you glad we didn’t leave to get that soda?” As soon as I finish my sentence six white boys walk up to the front of the line to cut. I’m as hot as fish grease! I have my Black women’s hair issues standing in line in all that humidity, losing my curls and now these white boys.....

http://www.northstarnews.com/opinions/contributors/article/1412

Sea Breeze: A Journal of Contemporary Liberian Writings

2009-08-23T13:34:00.000-07:00

Sea Breeze; A Journal of Contemporary Liberian Writings is another gem of online publications. As its name indicates, it is a journal that addresses the concerns of Liberia and its Diaspora.

My poem, Deliver Me From the Hands of Strange Children, first appeared in Sea Breeze.

Please take time to discover a wonderful and needed journal. Here's the link. http://www.liberiaseabreeze.com/

Deliver Me From The Hands of Strange Children

By Octavia McBride-Ahebee

On the Day of the Dead,

On the day we plead on their behalf,

he *naked me,

stripped my body

in front of carved saints, elegantly stoic

cloistered in their own uselessness

he naked me

in front of bands of soldier boys, spellbound and spoiled,

wearing their sisters’ dresses and their mothers’ wigs

their necks encased in feather boas and forest paint

their waists jeweled with the feces of Cold War arsenals

in a church garden wild with perfume

under a bush plum tree

the kind we make our Christmas pudding from

he naked me

as I quietly pleaded to the holy queen

as he told me her ears were stuffed with cassava leaves

and her son’s many failures

as he pissed his discontent in my face

he laid me beneath a neighboring mango tree

magnificent in its promise to shield

and he used a bayonet like a crochet hook

pushing through my vagina

in search of hidden bounty

in search of buried cell phones and soiled cash

pulling from its walls only prayer beads

christened by frightened menses

for such a gross disappointment

he placed mary’s head

machete-sharpened and faceless

in there instead

*Naked, used as a verb, is a Liberian description of the military tactic employed by boy soldiers in which they stripped civilians, particularly women, of their clothing as a means of humiliation.

Damazine; An Online Journal of the Muslim World

2009-08-23T12:28:00.000-07:00

My most recent publication is in the current issue of Damazine, a new and growing voice of the Muslim world, which is our world. My poem, An Engagement For Burning, which appears in Damazine, was inspired by the problem of women burning themselves, self-immolation, particularly in Herat, Afghanistan.

Here's the link www.damazine.com

Here's a link to a series of news stories about this problem.

http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2009/03/17/an-afghan-woman-commits-self-immolation-in-herat.html