MARIAHADESSA EKERE TALLIE

Dear Continuum:

I got an issue of Poets and Writers in the mail yesterday. I enjoyed what I read but it was not inspiring at all. It was realistic. It was honest about the uphill battle it is to get a book seen. I know the work of this all too well. But this letter is not about books, this is about voice and the love and armor you will need to have yours heard.

When I think about being a writer in 2013, being a writer with a Black woman’s voice–(“I am a black woman…and I sound like one.”  Lucille Clifton) –with no agent, no powerful mentor opening doors, no financial support, no salary, no benefits, then I realize that this really is a crazy path. Deciding to be a writer was beautiful. Writing is beautiful. Deciding that my concerns, dreams, hopes and voice are valid and committing myself to putting my visions on paper has been a deeply healing experience. This work connects me to people I have never set my eyes on. However, being a writer in a country that does not support art and writing from the heart of my Black woman mama mouth is a struggle that I am sometimes left speechless by. (But the point is to exhaust me/us beyond words, isn’t it? So I rest up and speak on.) Beloved, this landscape is actually more treacherous now than when I started 19 years ago. I don’t say this to discourage you; I say this because you need to know that you are embarking on the path of most resistance; if you plan to walk it, you need to study and you need endurance.

Listen, there are all sorts of color in conferences and departments now. Much of that writing is non-threatening and status quo. It’s the type of work that could have come from 18th Century nowhere. Work that no one in our communities or families could wrap around cold shoulders or grasp onto in desperate moments or even nod at in faint recognition. That, we are constantly being told, is poetry. That exsanguinated verse. But you and I both know poetry can be soulful, grounded, gravity-defying and irrepressible. If your poems walk picket lines, work in soup kitchens, gather dandelion leaves, sweat, jump rope, wear stilettos, shout, give birth, watch the phases of the moon, or know that it is appropriate to put flowers in the ocean on New Year’s Eve and pour liquor on the earth before anyone living takes a sip, then supposedly they are not poems. Supposedly you missed the memo on craft and your poems will be returned to sender. Save your postage. Honor your time.

Tap your cimarron blood, tap the defiant DNA that gives your hair such good posture. Find a community of poets dedicated to writing and walking and being liberation. Study Hughes, Baldwin, Hurston, Walker, Shange, Baraka, Hayden, Dumas, Bandele, Johnson, Girmay, Moore, Rux, Hammad, Rich, Clifton, Boyce-Taylor, Brooks, Madhubuti, Medina, Forche, Ya Salaam, Rojas, Rivera, Knight, Esteves, Kaliba, Simmons, Kaufman,Sanchez, Finney, Perdomo, Espada, Betts (This is your work and there are so many more to study; you will find them as you make your way). Read, write, edit and find a way–let the poems find their way–get those words read and heard. Find someone unbought to publish your stuff. Be really brave and publish the work yourself but don’t stop there, publish the poets around you who stand on the frontlines and refuse to bow down. Publish those mamas bringing their babies to readings, those poets whose works are in anthologies that they read in the food stamp office, those lettered poets who can’t make the rent,  those poets with a day job who organize free workshops and salons, those poets who never lose their accents, the ones cast off in a spoken-word ghetto because they actually dare to connect with an audience–all of them who are all of us who fight this fight because we are determined to keep the doors open for the next generation and because we would go crazy without our tongues, without our pens braiding the strands of our thoughts into some type of beauty. Not pressing our voices flat. Flat to that white rageless whisper. Not doing that and paying a heavy price.

And so it is.

One love,
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie

>via: http://herkind.org/articles/on-my-mind/letter-to-a-young-poet-dedicated-to-crafting-our-liberation