photo by Alex Lear

GHOSTS

i have the smile of my great-grandmother seeing the end of slavery

& you have the hairline of an uncle/an aunt

who never pressed nor otherwise chemically altered their hair

only fools don’t intimately know ghosts,

the dna of humanity, leaping like porpoises slick out of the sea

and back into our walks, our mannerisms, the way we giggle

when nervous, blush when aroused, or spit fire words

in sputtering ocher anger facing back the cannibalism of capitalism

ghosts are

just spirits fluttering angel breaths thru our corpuscles

the wing hum of hummingbirds motivating us to sound

snatches of remembered songs, lyrics formerly unheard

in this lifetime, psychicly transmuted across eras,

mali melodies maintained, aural treasures from our undying befores

face east young people, face east

imagine each line in your hand an ancestor

how well do you know the thoroughness of yesterday,

the arching influence of the previous century, the retrograde

of rationality, so slow compared to the velocity

of history smashing into the protons of personality

imagine, your voice is the texture of sun yat sen singing

a freedom song, your social erectness the reincarnate posture

of sitting bull standing barefoot his clear eyes kissing dark earth,

imagine, your breath the aroma of emiliano zapata biting the bullet

of revolution and spitting fire on the butts of robber barons

and dark-faced overseers who are the psychological sons

of simon legree in their twisted brutality towards their own people,

the definance of your unsurrendering war stance could be ghana’s

yaa asantewa hurling up the west coast facing down british bullets

confident that the religion of resistance will always outlive

the technology of repression, you could be the heroics of history,

a phantasmagoria of sacred strugglers vivifying the surge

of timeless protoplasm which careens through your veins

and gives substance to the willfulness of your animated engagement

with the omnivorous enemies of the planet earth

ghosts are

sacred illuminations coloring our stratagems and meditations,

they are the realization of sanity, the moment we truly understand

just how wicked the west actually is, the translucent

lights on the front porches of our spirits beckoning, guiding our

soft footsteps on the path, heading back homeward bound

dancing into the social circle of our collective selves

ghosts remind us

each individual is more than one, a communal hope chest

of ancient dreams actualized in the present

i believe in ghosts, i do

because i would be soulless matter otherwise

i would be some french rationalist trying to intellectually manufacture

& market the focus of life as the ego of thought, would be

some compassionless corporate ceo with spiritual arthritis

uninformed by the blessings of sharing, while pretending

that material possessions elevate morality as if you are what you own

rather than are what you do/be in relation to others and the world

ghosts

do not like vaults and crypts, nor fences and forts

real ghosts prefer sensitive personalities and wild open spaces,

every time we inhale a leaf shakes,

a tree or a weed offers us breath

give thanks to the grass for our daily inhalations

i am not a mystic

but i know there are ghosts

in the fecund topsoil which progress

callously covers with concrete,

i understand the reality that dust and dirt are airborne bones

pulverized by time into tiny particles

a rose by any other name is still the collected essence

of our forebearers grown through the life cycle into a fragrant state

of petal soft beauty on a bud whose shape is nature’s re-creation

of the vaginal portal, whose redness is an honoring

of feminine life force and the blood value of matriarchy

if you do not believe in ghosts

where do you think your spirit will be

when the corporeal temple of your familiar

crumbles into seemingly insignificant pebbles of peat, or

when your temporal sanctuary dehydrates

once disconnected from the moisturizing of life’s cosmic juice,

when the way station of your flesh altar no longer receives offerings

& when you revert to what you were before your human being

was conceived and made flesh via the union of your parents,

won’t you be a ghost then?

there are literally millions of lives in your little finger

the karma of colonialism will not be undone

not unless and until the ghosts that reside

in the hosts of color worldwide can find a culture

which resonates daily contentment,

there will be no end to the wandering search for the promised land

unless and until ghosts can live

inside the wholeness of beating hearts synchronized

in embracement, respecting the healing touch

of every manifestation of life no matter how small, obscure,

or ostensibly insignificant,

no calming the tempest,

no mediation of the disruption of our heritage

not unless and until ghosts can emigrate

into a peace filled community of souls such as we

ought to be, vessels of awareness, responsible in our openness

to offer wholesome residences for the motion flow

of history seeking future,

there will always be a wailing issuing out our mouths

unless and until ghosts can live and

comfortably reside, live, and rest inside, rest

in peace, rest in us

ghosts

peace

ghosts

rest

ghosts

in

ghosts

peace

ghosts

rest

ghosts

in

ghosts

us

 —kalamu ya salaam

______________________

Kalamu ya Salaam – vocals

Stephan Richter – bass clarinet

Wolfi Schlick – tenor & reeds

Frank Bruckner – guitar

Roland HH Biswurm – drums

Recorded: May 31, 1998 – Munich, Germany

21 May 2017

The struggles of

war babies

fathered by

black GIs

Image copyright GETTY IMAGES

About 100,000 black GIs were stationed in the UK during the war. Inevitably there were love affairs, but US laws usually prevented black servicemen from marrying. So what happened to the children they fathered? Fiona Clampin met two such children in Dorset, now in their seventies, who have not given up hope of tracing their fathers.

A bottle of champagne has sat on a shelf in Carole Travers’s wardrobe for the past 20 years. Wedged between boxes and covered with clothes, it’ll be opened only when Carole finds her father. “There’s an outside chance he might still be alive,” she reflects. “I’ve got so many bits of information, but to know the real truth would mean the world to me – to know that I did belong to somebody.”

The possibility of Carole tracking down her father becomes more and more remote by the day. Born towards the end of World War Two, Carole, now 72, was the result of a relationship between her white mother and a married African-American or mixed-race soldier stationed in Poole, in Dorset.

Whereas some “brown babies” (as the children of black GIs were known in the press) were put up for adoption, Carole’s mother, Eleanor Reid, decided to keep her child. The only problem was, she was already married, with a daughter, to a Scot with pale skin and red hair.

“I had black hair and dark skin,” says Carole. “Something obviously wasn’t right.”

Image copyright CAROLE TRAVERS
Image caption Carole Travers with a friend

The difference between Carole and her half-siblings only dawned on the young girl at the age of six, when she overheard her parents having an argument. “Does she know? Well, it’s about time she did,” said her stepfather, in Carole’s retelling of the story. She remembers how her mother sat her down at the kitchen table and told Carole the truth about her background.

“I was chuffed I was different,” she says. “I used to tell my friends, ‘My dad’s an America,’ without really knowing what that meant.”

In 1950s Dorset there were very few mixed-race or black children, and having one out of wedlock carried a huge stigma. Although Carole doesn’t remember any specific racist remarks, she recalls the stares. Parents would shush their children when she and her family got on the bus.

Carole says her “blackness” was considered cute when she was a child, but as she grew up she became more aware of her difference. “I remember once being in a club and there was a comedian who started making jokes about black people. I’m stood there and I’m thinking: ‘Everyone’s looking at me,'” she says.

“I always felt inferior. As a teenager, I would stand back, I thought that nobody would ever want to know me because of my colour.

“I was going out with one boy, and his mother found out about me. She put a stop to it because she remarked that if we had kids, they would be ‘coloured’.”

Image copyrightWEYMOUTH REFERENCE LIBRARY
Image captionGIs at work in Weymouth harbour

Seventy-two-year-old John Stockley, another child of an African-American GI stationed further down the Dorset coast in Weymouth, does remember the racial abuse in striking detail.

John was called names to such an extent that at the age of seven he decided he would try to turn his skin pale to be like his classmates.

“I worked out that if I drank milk of magnesia [a laxative] and ate chalk I would make myself go white,” he chuckles. “I think I drank over half the bottle! You can imagine the effect. It wasn’t good and it tasted disgusting.”

In one playground incident a boy insulted him with the N-word and called him “dirty”, but when John thrashed him he found himself summoned to the school office.

“It was a winter’s day in the early 1950s,” John explains.

“I was playing football and I collided with another guy. By this time I was quite fiery, I wouldn’t take it, and a blow was struck. I made his nose bleed. To this day I can see the blood on the snow.

“My mother lived less than 100 yards from the school, and she was summoned to the office with me. I remember her shaking next to me, holding my hand. The secretary told her what had happened and he said to my mother: ‘You have to remember, Mrs Stockley, these people cannot be educated.’ That puts my hackles up now.”

Shocking though the racism seems to us today, it was arguably family life which had a more pernicious effect on these mixed-race children. “Your mum made a mistake,” one of his aunts once told John Stockley.

“The ‘mistake’ is me,” he says.

John’s description of his childhood spent living with his grandparents in a village behind Chesil Beach sounds idyllic. But that’s to ignore the reason why he went there in the first place. Determined to punish his wife for her double transgression, John’s stepfather did not allow him to live in the family home except from Monday to Friday during school term.

Even then, John was not permitted to enter the house by the front door. At weekends he was packed off to his maternal grandparents, who provided him with the stable and loving family life he craved – and a refuge from his stepfather.

“Of course, coming back from the war and finding his wife with a black child must have been a great shock,” John acknowledges.

“And they never had any children together. But there was no love at all for him from me, because of what he did to my mother. She was effectively kept in a position of restraint, and I’d see her go through depression because she wanted to do things she couldn’t.”

John says his stepfather – a gambler and philanderer – exercised control over his mother despite the fact that she ran a successful guesthouse. He decided who John’s mother could or could not be friends with, John says.

“And he didn’t like us to be too close. If some music came on the radio when he wasn’t there, I would dance with her because she loved to jitterbug. But not when he was around. We were told to stop.”

Carole Travers’s stepfather began divorce proceedings when he found out what his wife had done in his absence. However, when it appeared that he wouldn’t get custody of their daughter (Carole’s half-sister), he returned to the family home and Carole took his surname.

He appeared to accept Carole on the surface, but towards the end of his life he telephoned her and dropped a bombshell. He wouldn’t be leaving her anything in his will, he told her, “because you’re nothing to do with me”.

“The money didn’t matter,” says Carole. “But what he said really hurt me. I told him, ‘You’re my dad, you’ve always been my dad, and you’re the only dad I’ve ever known’.”

Married and with children of her own by this time, Carole started trying to trace her biological father, based on the scraps of information her mother had given her in the weeks before she died. “It just didn’t occur to me to ask questions when I was younger,” she says, the tone of regret in her voice clear.

“My stepfather would always bring me up in any argument with my mother, referring to me as ‘your bastard’, and I learned not to rock the boat. I just got on with my life.”

* * * * * 

Find out more

Image caption – Deborah Prior, front row, in the light dress, lived in Holnicote House in Somerset along with other mixed-race children – the photograph was used to attract potential adoptive parents

Not all GI babies were able to stay with their mothers. Dr Deborah Prior was born in 1945, to a widow in Somerset and a black American serviceman. Her mother was persuaded to give her up, and for five years Deborah lived in Holnicote House, a special home for mixed-race children. Deborah spoke to Woman’s Hour along with Prof Lucy Bland, who is researching this under-reported chapter of social history.

• Listen to Dr Deborah Prior’s interview on Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4
• Listen to Carole Travers and John Stockley in full

 

* * * * *

Like Carole, John Stockley wanted to protect his mother by keeping quiet. “I could see it was going to upset her if I asked too many questions, and upset her was the last thing I was going to do,” he says. He would take his chance occasionally, although his mother would always evade his enquiries. But John remembers with characteristic clarity the last time he brought up the subject of his real father.

“I remember her saying to me in the course of a minor argument between us: ‘You don’t know what I’ve been through because of you.’

“And I said to her: ‘You don’t know what I’ve been through because of you!’ She went pale, and realised what she’d said and how she’d put her foot in it. But we never went any further than that. She just looked at me in a sad sort of way, and I said, ‘Have I ever done anything to make you ashamed of me?’ And she said no. And that was the last we ever spoke about it.”

It was turning 70 that prompted John to start looking for information about his father, whereas Carole has spent almost half her life searching for a man she knows only as “Burt”. Neither of them has many facts to go on – Carole believes her stepfather destroyed the only photos and letters that could have helped her identify Burt. But while their searches may come to nothing, they both take solace from the fact that their mothers loved them against all the odds, and that they were born of loving relationships, not one-night stands.

“My mother told me my father was the only man she ever really loved,” says Carole. “And I’ve had Mum’s friends say to me since her death: ‘Don’t ever feel ashamed of your background, because you were born out of love and your mum wanted you.’ She knew he was going back to America and she wanted something of him, something to hold on to.”

>via: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39927255

05.22.17

Inside the Head

of Dylann Roof,

Jihadist for

White Hate

Never-before-reported documents
about Roof’s psychological exams
give us a look deep inside the ‘logic’
of this murderous white supremacist
—and terrorists everywhere.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ELIZABETH BROCKWAY/THE DAILY BEAST

>via: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/22/inside-the-head-of-dylann-roof-a-terrorist-paradigm?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning

MAY 04, 2017

Marissa Alexander,

Jailed for 3 Years,

Speaks Out on

Intimate Partner

Violence &

Building

Movements

We turn now to the case of Marissa Alexander, the African-American mother of three who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing what she maintains was a warning shot at her abusive husband in 2010. She attempted to use Florida’s “stand your ground” law in her defense—the law that was made famous when white vigilante George Zimmerman successfully used it as his defense after he shot and killed unarmed African-American teenager Trayvon Martin. But in March 2012, the jury rejected Alexander’s use of “stand your ground” and convicted her after only 12 minutes of deliberation. She was sentenced to 20 years behind bars under a Florida law known as “10-20-Life” that carries a mandatory minimum for certain gun crimes regardless of the circumstance. Alexander won an appeal for a new trial and later accepted a plea deal that capped her sentence to three years of time served. Earlier this year, she was freed from house arrest after being jailed for three years and serving two years of court-ordered home confinement. We go to Jacksonville to speak to Marissa Alexander.

—Democracy Now

>via: https://www.democracynow.org/2017/5/4/marissa_alexander_jailed_for_3_years?utm_content=buffer1df21&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer 

The Doom and Glory of

Knowing Who You Are:

James Baldwin on

the Empathic Rewards of

Reading and

What It Means

to Be an Artist

“An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian.
His role is to make you realize the doom and glory
of knowing who you are and what you are.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

 

“A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven,” James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) wrote in his classic 1962 essay “The Creative Process.” By then, he was already one of America’s most celebrated writers — an artist who shook up the baseboards of society by dismantling the structures of power and convention with unflinching fortitude, dignity, and integrity of conviction.

On May 17, 1963, Baldwin appeared on the cover of TIMEmagazine as part of a major story titled “Nation: The Root of the Negro Problem,” whose lead sentence read: “At the root of the Negro problem is the necessity of the white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to live with himself.” Although Baldwin’s civil rights advocacy was the focus, the piece shone a sidewise gleam on Baldwin the artist and raised the broader question of the writer’s role in society.

The following week, the May 24 issue of LIFE magazine — which was owned by the same company — built on that cultural momentum with an extensive profile of him by journalist Jane Howard, where under the dated title “Telling Talk from a Negro Writer” Baldwin’s timeless wisdom on life and art unfolds.

James Baldwin (Photograph: Sedat Pakay)

The lengthy profile is divided into several sections covering different aspects of his life and views. Beneath the spectacular subhead “Doom and glory of knowing who you are,” Baldwin — who had read his way from Harlem to literary celebrity — considers the unparalleled empathic gift of reading:

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.

A year after he formulated his abiding ideas on the artist’s role as a disruptor of society, and more than a century after Emerson insisted that “only as far as [people] are unsettled is there any hope for them,” Baldwin considers this vital commitment to generative unsettlement as the central animating force of the creative spirit:

An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is tell that, I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are.

I want to be stretched, shook up, to overreach myself, and to make you feel that way too.

Two decades before he shared his advice on being a writer in The Paris Review, Baldwin reflects on the inevitability of the calling:

The terrible thing about being a writer is that you don’t decide to become one, you discover that you are one.

James Baldwin writing

Echoing what E.E. Cummings wryly termed “the agony of the Artist with capital A,” Baldwin adds:

In this country … if you’re an artist, you’re guilty of a crime: not that you’re aware, which is bad enough, but that you see things other people don’t admit are there.

Complement with Baldwin on the artist’s struggle for integrity, freedom and how we imprison ourselves, and the writer’s responsibility in a divided society, then revisit his increasingly timely forgotten conversations with Chinua Achebe about the political power of art, with Margaret Mead about identity, race, and the experience of otherness, and with Nikki Giovanni about what it means to be truly empowered.

 

>via: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/05/24/james-baldwin-life-magazine-1963/

>via: http://www.berlinartlink.com/2017/05/21/open-call-the-afrofuturist-affair-time-camp-001/

THE 2017 SEXTON PRIZE

The Sexton Prize is an annual publication award with a $1,000 honorarium for an outstanding new collection of poetry by an American poet. The winning manuscript will be published, distributed, and marketed by Eyewear Publishing LTD in both the United States and the United Kingdom simultaneously in the Spring of 2018.

The Sexton Prize is open to poets at all career stages, from emerging to established; poets of every age and level of publication experience are encouraged to submit. Finalists will also be considered for publication.

Submissions ARE NOW open and close JUNE 1, 2017. THE WINNER will be announced no later than NOVEMBER1, 2017.

The final judge for the 2017 Sexton Prize is PROFESSOR KIMIKO HAHN – a major American poet.

The fee to submit to The Sexton Prize is $25. Entrants receive a 50% off coupon for Eyewear Publishing LTD purchases.

ABOUT THE JUDGE

Kimiko Hahn is the author of nine books of poems, including: Brain Fever (W.W. Norton, 2014) and Toxic Flora (WWN, 2010), both collections inspired by science; The Narrow Road to the Interior(WWN, 2006) a collection that takes its title from Basho’s famous poetic journal; The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), which received an American Book Award; Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award. As part of her service to the CUNY community, she initiated a Chapbook Festival that has become an annual event co-sponsored by major literary organizations. Since then, she has added chapbooks to her publication list: Ragged Evidence, A Field Guide to the Intractable, Boxes with Respect and The Cryptic Chamber. Hahn takes pleasure in the challenges of collaboration: writing text for film (Coal Fields, 1985 experimental documentary by Bill Brand, Ain’t Nuthin’ But a She-Thing 1995 MTV special, and Everywhere at Once 2008 film based on Peter Lindbergh’s still photos and narrated by Jeanne Moreau), artwork (Lauren Henkin’s photographic series); dance pieces with Tomie Hahn.

Honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught in graduate programs at the University of Houston and New York University, and is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York; she has also taught for literary organizations such as the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem and Kundiman. Hahn lives in New York with her husband, true crime writer Harold Schechter.

WHAT MAKES THE SEXTON PRIZE UNIQUE?

The Sexton Prize offers an American poet an opportunity to build an international reputation, as the winning manuscript will be published, distributed, promoted, and nominated for major post-publication awards in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The Sexton Prize is open to poets at all career stages, from emerging to established; poets of every age and level of publication experience are encouraged to submit. The winner of The Sexton Prize will be published within one year of selection, and finalists will also be considered for publication. 

GUIDELINES

• Submissions must be made via Eyewear Publishing LTD’s Submittable page between January 6 and JUNE 1, 2017. The fee to submit is $25.

• Manuscripts must be original work, between 48 and 100 pages in length, by a single author, in the English language. There are no restrictions on style or subject matter. The Eyewear staff encourage writers from diverse backgrounds to submit their work. 

• Individual poems in the submission may have been previously published online, in periodicals, or in chapbooks, but the collection as a whole must not have been previously published (self publishing constitutes prior publication).

• Submissions should be made without the inclusion of an acknowledgments page.

ELIGIBILITY

The Sexton Prize is open to American poets who either reside in the U.S. or who will be residing in the U.S. as of January 2018. The Prize is open to citizens as well as residents holding legal statuses including Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival, Temporary Protected, and Legal Permanent (“green card”), among others. Contact Eyewear if you have questions about eligibility.

CODE OF ETHICS

• All entries will be screened by the Eyewear Publishing LTD staff; we will not use students or interns to screen submissions. 

• The Final Judge of The 2017 Sexton Prize is Kimiko Hahn. Close friends, employees, family members, and current students of the final judge are not eligible to submit to The Sexton Prize.

• Authors who have had a full-length work published by Eyewear Publishing LTD are not eligible to submit to The Sexton Prize. 

• The Sexton Prize takes its name from the church office of the sexton: a custodian of sacred objects and a ringer of bells that call communities to gather. It’s our mission in The Sexton Prize to be caretakers of literary talent in our time, and to sound the call for international literary communities to come together in the celebration of poetry. It also echoes the name of a poet important to us.

>via: https://store.eyewearpublishing.com/pages/sexton-prize-for-poetry?utm_content=51173811&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

OPEN COUNTRY PRESS

Helena, Montana

>via: http://opencountrypress.org/submissions/?utm_content=53502842&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

SassaCyprigo