KAT WEBB
Kalamu ya Salaam's information blog
KAT WEBB
NINA SIMONE
Nina is song. Not just a vocalist or singer, but actual song. The physical vibration and the meaning too. A reflection and projection of a certain segment of our mesmerizing ethos. Culturally specific in attitude, in rhythm, in what she harmonizes with and what she clashes against, merges snugly into and hotly confronts in rage. All that she is. Especially the contradictions and contrarinesses. And why not. If Nina is song. Our song. She would have to be all that.
Nina is not her name. Nina is our name. Nina is how we call ourselves remade into an uprising. Eunice Waymon started out life as a precocious child prodigy — amazingly gifted at piano. She went to church, sang, prayed and absorbed all the sweat of the saints: the sisters dropping like flies and rising like angels all around her. Big bosoms clad in white. Tambourine-playing, cotton-chopping, tobacco-picking, corn-shucking, floor-mopping, child-birthing, man-loving hands. The spray of sweat and other body secretions falling on young Eunice’s face informing her music for decades to come with the fluid fire of quintessential Black musicking. But there was also the conservatory and the proper way to approach the high art of music. The curve of the hands above the keyboard. The ear to hear and mind to understand the modulations in and out of various keys. The notes contained in each chord. She aspired to be a concert pianist. But at root she was an obeah woman. With voice and drum she could hold court for days, dazzle multitudes, regale us with the splendor, enrapture us with the serpentine serendipity of her black magic womanistness articulated in improvised, conjured incantations. “My daughter said, mama, sometimes I don’t understand these people. I told her I don’t understand them either but I’m born of them, and I like it.” Nina picked up Moses’ writhing rod, swallowed it and now hisses back into us the stories of our souls on fire. Hear me now, on fire.
My first memory of Nina is twofold. One that music critics considered her ugly and openly said so. And two that she was on the Tonight show back in the late fifties/very early sixties singing “I Love You Porgy.” Both those memories go hand in hand. Both those memories speak volumes about what a Black woman could and could not do in the Eisenhower era. They called her ugly because she was Black. Literally. Dark skinned. In the late fifties, somewhat like it is now, only a tad more adamant, couldn’t no dark skinned woman be pretty. In commercial terms, the darker the uglier. Nina was dark. She sang “Porgy” darkly. Made you know that the love she sang about was the real sound of music, and that Julie Andrews didn’t have a clue. Was something so deep, so strong that I as a teenager intuitively realized that Nina’s sound was both way over my head and was also the water within which my soul was baptized. Which is probably why I liked it, and is certainly why my then just developing moth wings sent me shooting toward the brilliant flashes of diamond bright lightening which shot sparking cobalt blue and ferrous red out of the black well of her mouth. This was some elemental love. Some of the kind of stuff I would first read about in James Baldwin’s Another Country, a book that America is still not ready to understand. Love like that is what Nina’s sound is.
Her piano was always percussive. It hit you. Moved you. Socked it to you. She could hit one note and make you sit up straight. Do things to your anatomy. That was Nina. Made a lot of men wish their name was Porgy. That’s the way she sang that song. I wanted to grow up and be Porgy. Really. Wanted to grow up and get loved like Nina was loving Porgy. For a long time, I never knew nobody else sang that song. Who else could possibly invest that song with such a serious message, serious meaning? Porgy was Nina’s man. Nina’s song. She loved him. And he was well loved.
In my youth, I didn’t think she was ugly. Nor did I didn’t think she was beautiful. She just looked like a dark Black woman. With a bunch of make-up on in the early days. Later, I realized what she really looked like was an African mask. Something to shock you into a realization that no matter how hard you tried, you would never ever master white beauty because that is not what you were. Fundamental Blackness. Severe lines. Severe, you hear me. I mean, you hear Nina. Dogonic, chiseled features. Bold eyes. Ancient eyes. Done seen and survived slavery eyes. A countenance so serious that only hand carved mahogany or ebony could convey the features.
The hip-notism of her. The powerful peer. Percussive piano. Pounding pelvis. The slow, unhurried sureness. An orgasm that starts in the toes and ends up zillions of long seconds later emanating as a wide-mouthed silent scream uttered in some sonic range between a sigh and a whimper. A coming so deep, you don’t tremble, you quake. I feel Nina’s song and think of snakes. Damballa undulations. Congolesian contractions. She is an ancient religion renewed. The starkness of resistance. And nothing Eurocentric civilization can totally contain. Dark scream. Be both the scream and the dark. A crusty fist shot straight up in the air, upraised head. Maroon. Runaway. No more auction block. The one who did not blink when their foot was cut off to keep them from running away. And they just left anyway. Could stand before the overseer and not be there. Could answer drunken requests to sing this or that love song and create a seance so strong you sobered up and afterwards reeled backward, pawing the air cause you needed a drink. You could not confuse Nina Simone with some moon/june, puritan love song. Nina was the sound that sent slave masters slipping out of four posted beds and roaming through slave quartered nights. Yes, Nina was. And was too the sound that sent them staggering back with faces and backs scratched, teeth marked cheeks, kneed groins, and other signs of resistance momentarily tattooed on their pale bodies. And despite her fighting spirit, or perhaps because of her fighting spirit, the strength and ultra high standard of femininity she established with her every breath, these men who would be her master would not sell her. Might whip her a little, but not maim her. Well, nothing beyond cutting the foot so she would stay. With Nina it could get ugly if you came at her wrong, and something in her song said any White man approaching with intentions of possessing me is wrong. Nina sounded like that. Which is why this anti-fascist German team wrote “Pirate Jenny” and it was a long, long time before I realized that the song wasn’t even about Black people.
Nina Simone was/is something so potent, so fascinating. A fertile flame. A cobra stare. Once you heard her, you could not avoid her, avoid the implications of her sound, be ye Black, White or whatever. Her blackness embraced the humanity in all who heard her, who experienced being touched by her, whose eyes welled up with tears sometimes, feeling the panorama of sensations she routinely but not rotely evoked wherever, whenever she sat at the altar of her piano and proceeded to unfurl the spiritual history of her people. When Nina sang, sings, if you are alive, and hear her, really hear her, you become umbilicaled into the cosmic and primal soul of suffering and resurrection, despair and hope, slavery and freedom that all humans have, at one level or another, both individually and ethnically, experienced, even if only vicariously. After all, who knows better the range of reactions to the blade, than does the executioner who swings the axe?
Nina hit you in the head, in the heart, in the gut and in the groin. But she hit you with music, and thus her sonorous fusillades, even at their most furious, did you no harm. In fact, the resulting outpouring of passions was a healing. A lancing of sentimental sacs which held the poisons of oppressive tendencies, the biles of woe-filled self-pity. A draining from the body of those social toxicants which embitter one’s soul. A removal of the excrescent warts of prejudice and chauvinism that blight one’s civil make-up.
Sangoma Simone sang and her sound was salving and salubrious. Her concerts were healing circles. Her recordings medicinal potions. She gave so much. Partaking of her drained you of cloying mundanities. Poured loa-ed essentials into the life cup. You left her presence, filled to your capacity and aware of how much there was to achieve by being a communicative human being.
Nina Simone. Supper clubs could not hold her. Folk songs were not strong enough. Popular standards too inane. Even though she did them. Did them to death. Took plain soup, and when she finished adding her aural herbs, there you had gumbo. Nina hit her stride with the rebellious uprises of the sixties, and the fierce pride of the seventies. Became a Black queen, an African queen. Became beautiful. Remember, I am talking about a time when we really believed Black was beautiful. Not just ok, acceptable, nothing to be ashamed of, but beautiful. Proud. And out there. Not subdued. Not refined. Not well mannered. But out there. Way out. Like Four Women. Like Mississippi Goddamn. Like Young, Gifted And Black. Like Revolution. Like: “And I Mean Every Word Of It”. This was Nina who did an album with only herself. Voice. Piano. And some songs that commented on the human condition in terms bolder than had ever been recorded in popular music before. Are we The Desperate Ones? Have We Lost The Human Touch?
My other memories of Nina have to do with the aftermath. I recall the aridness of counterrevolutionary America clamping down and shuttering the leading lights of the seventies. Nina’s radiance was celestial, but oh my, how costly the burning. Seeking fuel she fled into exile. Who would be her well, where could she find a cool drink of water before she died?
Then, like indiscreet body odors, the rumors and gossip began floating back. The tempest. The turning in on the self. What happens when they catch you and bring you back. Reify and commodify you, relegate you back into slavery. You are forced to fight in little and sometimes strange ways. But the thrill is gone. Cause only freedom is thrilling, and ain’t no thrill in being contained on anybody’s plantation, chained to anybody’s farm. Anybody’s, be they man, woman or child. Nobody’s. Nothing thrilling about not being liberated.
Nina, like most of us, went crazy so that she could stay sane. Just did it hard. Was a more purer crazy. Cause she had so much to be sane about. So much that leeches wanted to siphon, sip, suck.
How do you stay sane in America? You go crazy. In order to be.
To be proud. And beautiful. And woman. And dark. Black skinned. You have to go crazy to stay sane. You have to scream, just to make room for your whispers. You have to cry and cuss, so that you can kiss and love. You have to fight. Fight. Fight. Lord. Fight. I gets. Fight. So tired. Fight. Of. Fight. Fighting all the time. But ooohhh child things are gonna get easier.
Don’t tell me about her deficiencies, or her screwed up business affairs, her temper tantrums, her lack of understanding, her bad luck with men, her walking off the stage on the audience. Don’t tell me about nothing. None of that. Because all of that ain’t Nina. Nina Simone is song. And all of that is just whatever she got to do. Like she said: Do What You Got To Do. Oh Lord, Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.
I play Nina Simone. Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow. This morning. Tonight at noon. Under the hot sun of Amerikkka, merrily, merrily, merrily denigrating us. In those terrible midnights. I play Nina Simone. Just to stay sane. Stay Black. To remember that Black is beautiful, not pretty. Beautiful is more than pretty. Beautiful is deep. I play beautiful Nina Simone. Nina Song. I play Nina Simone. And whether Nina’s song turns you off or Nina’s song turns you on, whose problem, whose opportunity is that?
No. Let me correct the English. I don’t play Nina Simone. I serious Nina Simone. Serious. Simone. Put on her recordings and Nzinga strut all night long. And even that is not long enough.
To be young, or ancient. Gifted, or ordinary. But definitely Black, definitely the terrible beauty of Blackness. Nina Simone. Nina Song. Nina. Nina. Nina.
Oh my god. I give thanx for Nina Simone.
—Kalamu ya Salaam
Frederick Douglass, a former slave,
became the most photographed
American in the 19th century
He considered photography a crucial aid
in the quest to end slavery
Douglass would have been a savvy
social media devotee, as he
continually updated his
public persona
The camera has become a potent weapon in a new civil rights movement, as people capture police misconduct. But the link between photography and civil rights isn’t new. It dates back to Frederick Douglass, the famous former slave, abolitionist orator and writer and postwar statesman.
Douglass was in love with photography. He wrote more extensively on the medium than any peer. He frequented photographers’ studios and sat for his portrait whenever he could. He became the most photographed American in the 19th century.
Douglass considered photography the most democratic of arts, a crucial aid in the quest to end slavery and achieve civil rights. With Louis Daguerre’s invention of the form of photography known to us as the daguerreotype, “the humblest servant girl may now possess a picture of herself such as the wealth of kings could not purchase 50 years ago,” Douglass said. Photography dignified the poorest of the poor; it was a potent equalizer.
Douglass first sat for his “likeness,” as daguerreotypes were often called, around 1841, at the beginning of his public career. By the decade’s end, he was famous at the very time photography had become popular. There were photographic studios in every city, county, and territory in the free states. Engravings, cut from these photographs, circulated as illustrations in best-selling books, including Douglass’.
The more rural southern slave states, however, were slower to embrace the medium. Defensive about slavery, white Southerners seemed to tacitly agree that there was much about their society best left un-illustrated. Photographic portraits bore witness to blacks’ essential humanity, countering the racist caricatures evident in lithographs and engravings.
Douglass’ portraits and words sent a message to the world that he had as much claim to citizenship, with the rights of equality before the law, as his white peers. This is why he always dressed up for the photographer, appearing “majestic in his wrath,” as one admirer said of a portrait from 1852.
The sheer number of Douglass portraits—160 separate poses, reproduced millions of times—conveys not only his faith in photography, but his understanding of the public identity he was crafting. Photographers sought Douglass out and loved working with him. One friend boasted that she “owned more than 20 pictures of him,” and described how “the photographers are running after him to sit for them.”
Douglass would have been a savvy social media devotee, as he continually updated his public persona. By doing so, he was defying the static foundations of both slavery and racism, which are predicated on the idea that some people of a certain race are somehow immutably inferior to others. Douglass’ fluid conception of the self united art and politics. He went so far as to say that “the moral and social influence of pictures” was more important in shaping national culture than “the making of its laws.”
His portraits evolved over the years from revolutionary freedom fighter to elder statesman. The most noticeable visual marker of his continual evolution is his facial hair and hairstyles. While 19th-century men experimented with hirsute faces, few did so as frequently as Douglass. He tracked, and often led, the prevailing fashion.
Nowadays, his portraits serve as an important visual legacy. Douglass was astute in his awareness of the potential of photography to change society, and so it’s fitting that this great American’s “likeness” has fought on for his worthy causes long after the man himself had passed on.
Muslims protect
Christians from
extremists in
Kenya bus attack
By Elahe Izadi and Sarah Kaplan
There was a sound of gunfire, and the impact of bullets striking steel, and the bus suddenly lurched to a stop just outside the northeastern Kenyan city of El Wak.
More than 10 Somali militants clambered on board, heavily armed, witnesses of the Monday attack told the Daily Nation, a Kenyan newspaper. The gunmen began shouting demands at the passengers, ordering them to get off the bus and separate into groups — Muslims on one side, everyone else on the other.
But Muslims aboard the bus traveling through northeastern Kenya helped protect the Christian passengers, witnesses and officials told numerous media outlets.
Two people died and at least three were injured during the attack on the bus and a truck, confirmed Mandera County Gov. Ali Roba, who described it as an act of terrorism.
A Kenyan security official, Mohamud Saleh, said al-Shabab rebels are thought to be responsible, the Associated Press reported. A spokesman for the Somalia-based Islamist militant group told Reuters that fighters shot at the bus and “some of the Christian enemies died and others were injured.”
Officials and witnesses said militants stopped the bus, asked passengers to identify their religion, and then attempted to separate them.
It has happened before. In November 2014, al-Shabab gunmen attacked a bus full of teachers in the same region, pulling 28 non-Muslim passengers from the vehicle and shooting them point blank, according to the Guardian. The following month, the BBC reported, the militant group did the same to non-Muslim workers at a quarry near the Somali border. The group has also indiscriminately killed both Muslims and non-Muslims during deadly attacks in Kenya, as it did in the April siege of Garissa University, in the country’s east, that left 147 people dead.
But not this time. Militants told passengers to get off the bus, “demanding that Muslims separate from Christians, but they refused,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement, according to Agence France-Presse.
“These Muslims sent a very important message of the unity of purpose, that we are all Kenyans and that we are not separated by religion,” Interior Minister Joseph Nkaissery told local media at a briefing. “Everybody can profess their own religion, but we are still one country and one people.”
Mandera County, where the attack took place, is in Kenya’s northeast along the border with Somalia. When the militants attempted to sort through the passengers, they told “locals” — most of whom are Muslim and ethnic Somalis — that they could get back on and be spared, according to the BBC.
They refused.
“We even gave some non-Muslims our religious attire to wear in the bus so that they would not be identified easily. We stuck together tightly,” Abdi Mohamud Abdi, a Muslim passenger, told Reuters. “The militants threatened to shoot us, but we still refused and protected our brothers and sisters. Finally they gave up and left but warned that they would be back.”
Deputy County Commissioner Julius Otieno confirmed that account to Reuters, adding that Muslim passengers refused to help the militants, who “were trying to identify who were Muslims and who were not.”
“The locals showed a sense of patriotism and belonging to each other,” Roba, the county governor, told the Star, a Kenyan daily. He said the passengers insisted that al-Shabab either “kill them together or leave them alone.”
Another passenger, 28-year-old teacher Abdrirahman Hussein, told the APthat some Muslims gave head scarves to non-Muslims:
An extremist entered the bus and ordered everyone to get out and form two separate groups of non-Muslims and Muslims, said Hussein. One person, a non-Muslim decided to run and was shot in the back and died, he said. He said several non-Muslims managed to group with the Muslims.
An unnamed police official, speaking to AP, and injured witness Abdirashid Adan, speaking with Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper, said the militants eventually left the bus alone, thinking a police escort was not far behind. The official said a passenger lied about the police escort, while Adan said the sound of the vehicle prompted the gunmen to flee.
With the militants momentarily gone, the bus quickly departed. But one person died in a subsequent attack on a truck, according to reports.
After the bloodshed of the bus attack last November, buses carrying passengers to and from Mandera were given police escorts. But in this case, the bus bypassed a police roadblock, police spokesman Charles Owino told Reuters.
That 2014 attack also pushed hundreds of non-Muslim civil servants living in Mandera to seek shelter at a Kenyan military base, where they demanded that the government evacuate them from the region, according to the BBC. More than 2,000 teachers and many of the area’s health workers fled, leaving Mandera without many essential services.
Kenya’s poorly guarded northeastern border with Somalia is considered a security weak spot for the country. Though al-Shabab is based in Somalia, the group stepped up its cross-border violence after Kenya sent troops into Somalia to help fight the militants in 2011. The group has also said it believes northeastern Kenya should be part of Somalia.
Many Kenyan Muslims of Somali descent live in Mandera, a county on the northeastern border with Somalia.
Attacks by al-Shabab are now a semi-regular horror in Kenya’s eastern regions.
The incident on the bus Monday was a brave display of solidarity in a country strained by religious conflicts. But it was also a sign of how angry Mandera’s Muslims are about al-Shabab’s relentless violence in their region, the BBC pointed out. They have been victims of extremist attacks in the past, though they purportedly were not the target of the one on Monday.
As news of Monday’s incident spread on social media, people in Kenya and elsewhere hailed the #ManderaHeroes.
A bus attack Monday by Al Shabab in
northeast Kenya got rebuffed by
passengers who bravely refused to
divide into Muslims and Christians.
Kenyan Somalis are forced to take
civic responsibility for local education
and schools.
MANDERA AND GARISSA, KENYA — When the Somali militant group Al Shabab attacked a bus in Kenya’s remote northeast on Monday morning, they appeared to have a clear plan: Stop the bus. Separate the Christians on board. Kill them. Scare other Christians in the region enough to flee. Leave the local Muslims feeling abandoned by their countrymen.
That’s how it went a year ago, when the Islamist militants attacked another bus in Mandera County, killing 28 Christians on board. The incident sparked a mass exodus by thousands of non-local teachers and health workers who left behind a social service catastrophe – shuttered clinics, stalled development projects, and empty classrooms.
The predominantly Somali Muslim northeast has long depended on Kenyans from the rest of the country to fill jobs in education and healthcare. Their hasty retreat last year exposed how fickle that support can be amid mounting insecurity – and how vulnerable that leaves the region.
To cope, locals are owning their welfare and county governments are taking on responsibilities normally reserved for the national government, like the recruitment and paying of teachers.
The change is a step-up for the region. But it also plays into the hands of Al Shabab, which seeks to drive a wedge between Kenya’s Christians and Muslims, and between the Somali northeast and the rest of the country.
But during Monday’s bus attack the Muslims passengers flipped the script, telling the militants “to kill them together or leave them alone.” Several people died in the attack before the gunmen withdrew.
That brave act of unity has been cheered across the country and the world. But in the region it is recognized that building long-term security, not acts of defiance, is most needed to bring back the civil servants, including teachers. Monday’s bus attack – the fifth reported this month – counters any easy assumption that things are getting better. The northeast, its citizens say, will have to rescue itself.
Al Shabab’s bus attack last year left six teachers dead; all were working in Mandera. Virtually overnight most of the non-local teachers fled – some 900 out of 1,500.
Education officials in the town of Mandera, which lies just minutes from the porous border with war-torn Somalia, felt paralyzed.
“We were desperate. Our students were traumatized,” says Abdi Mohd Ali, Mandera county’s permanent secretary for education. “We had no options.”
County leaders knew the teachers weren’t coming back anytime soon. The teachers union had already petitioned for members in the northeast to be allowed to transfer elsewhere.
So they took took a different approach: Offering salaries to local high school graduates to take over classrooms. Money earmarked for road construction and a school feeding program went to pay their salaries, and parents also pitched in. During school holidays, the newly enlisted employees received a crash course in teaching.
Today the Mandera system has 871 new primary and secondary school teachers and a teacher’s college is expected to open in a year. Officials boast that soon they won’t need to recruit teachers from afar, and many say good riddance, because non-local teachers often showed up late for the term and left early.
“The national government didn’t come to our rescue,” Mr. Abdi says. “Up to now, they didn’t even tell us pole, sorry. We were left the way we were 50 years back.”
The effort at self-sufficiency also has benefits. Residents point out that a nationwide teacher’s strike over salaries shut down all of Kenya’s public schools this September, except in Mandera, where the county now pays salaries.
But the new trainee teachers are far from qualified. Many are young enough to blend in with the secondary school students. They are often quiet and unsure of themselves, and speak about how hard it is to command a room of peers.
They are also running months behind, says Mohammed Abdirahman, one of the few new teachers who meets the standard. He was getting an education degree in western Kenya when he decided to come back and help. He now teaches science at a boys’ school a few miles outside the town.
“Our children are being isolated. What’s the option?” he says.
“We don’t have any other option,” another budding teacher, Abdullahi Mohammed, says. “We’ll just pull up our socks.”
Further south, in Garissa, where last April Al Shabab killed 148 people at a university, it is local parents who have filled a void created by tragedy and flight.
Each school’s parent association collected 100 shillings, or roughly $1, per student. That helped supplement salaries and training, and attracted high school graduates and local retired teachers. About 70 were sent to the local teacher’s college as well.
Some parents are embittered by the situation. Musa Mahamud Hussein, the county secretary for Garissa’s parents’ association, watched as scores of educators left after the Mandera attack and many others following the deadly university attack.
He wants to make Garissa as independent as possible, having decided that his children’s education matters little to outsiders. Construction workers, traders, and even private school teachers have come back to much of the northeast. But teachers continue to stay away in large numbers.
(Many locals say they feel used and wonder if the teacher’s unions are making a political play at their children’s expense.)
“Every other civil servant is there. They haven’t run away, they are working,” says Mohamed Shaban, the head of the teacher’s commission in Garissa County. “We are talking a whole generation going without education. The anger will be there so much next year when the exam results are out.”
In Mr. Hussein’s view, the general position is that, “We can’t risk our lives for your own sake,” he says. “We want to give a chance to our people so this region can be self-sufficient.”
Outside the towns, which have police on every corner, the insecurity is even more pronounced: Schools are often surrounded by a cluster of homes and a few police reservists. In the quiet night many locals are fearful of Al Shabab attacks.
Behind the tensions here is the feeling that ethnic Somalis here have never been accepted as fully Kenyan, partly due to a failed secessionist war launched from here in the 1960s to join Somalia.
That means the drive for self-sufficiency after the exodus of non-locals brings risks, namely the widening of an already sizeable gulf with the rest of Kenya. The loss of teachers from other parts of the country, it is feared, will help sever one of the strongest ties binding them together.
“It negates the nature of the state. It is isolating them from the [country] center,” says Mukhtar Ogle, a Kenyan Somali from the northeast who works in the president’s office on issues facing the region, including violent extremism.
The result could also leave the rest of Kenya looking at this community with suspicion, warns local activist Ali AwDoll.
“You’ll be seen as a region that is detaching itself from the rest of Kenya [when] you’re just doing this to cope with a tragedy.”
This story was reported with support from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.
From The Struggle to Self Promote by Kiini Ibura Salaam.
It took two strippers and a dominatrix to convince me that there was merit to reading my work aloud to strangers.
When I first started writing and publishing stories and essays in the 90s, I refused to read my work. I had good reason to avoid the stage. Whenever I read, I would keep my head shoved down plowed through sentences at a mind-numbing speed. At the end, the audiences applauded me pity and support than literary appreciation.
In 1997, I participated in my first round of book promotions for the anthology Men We Cherish. There was a book party, a book signing, bookstore appearances, and finally a promotional appearance on a radio show. At that point I had a few successful readings under my belt. I’d learned to psyche myself up before reading, by chanting to myself: read slowly, read slowly, read slowly. So I thought I had the problem licked. On the show, the radio host interviewed us about our essays and then turned the mic over to us so we read. I don’t remember the actual experience of reading, I just remember getting the tape from the show afterwards. When I listened to it, I was shocked. I had been recorded skimming over my words with a mumbling quickness. Then I got angry. It wasn’t a live show. Why didn’t someone stop me and let me start over?
Soon after the radio fiasco, I started a writing group with a friend of mine. We set a unique requirement: whenever we presented work for critique, we had to read it aloud. Even within the safety of that circle of writers, I was nervous—hands shaking, quaky-voiced, speeding through each story, barely pausing to allow the plot to sink into the listeners’ ears. But repetition is an excellent teacher. Over time, I found my reading rhythm and comfort so that when the group dissolved, I was left with the ability to read slowly and clearly in public.
From that point on, I promised myself that EVERY time someone asked me to read, I would—which is how I found myself agreeing to read at an erotic event on Valentine’s Day. When I arrived at the event, I discovered there was also a dominatrix, a masseuse, and two strippers on the bill! I freaked out. Who—I thought—would want to hear a story after naked people have been traipsing around? The masseuse was the first to perform. Then came the strippers. The male stripper took over the space, popping his butt, picking women up in their chairs, and pushing his face into their breasts. The female stripper removed every stitch of her red patent leather outfit, and was showered in dollar bills before lying down on the floor, opening her legs, pouring hot candle wax from her throat down to (and into) her vulva. When the stripper had scurried off, the event planner turned to me and said, “You’re next!”
I have a thing about taking my medicine. Which means when I’m avoiding a task because I’m afraid or unsure or I don’t think people are going to like me, I do it anyway. So I stood up and read my story (a little too quickly). Halfway through, I realized the room was completely silent. Even through my tortured certainty that this was the wrong venue for my work, I knew that the audience was with me for every word. I had spent so many years thinking about what my writing is to me, I never considered what my writing was to others. Even though I knew my work had value, I never imagined that when I show up to read, I give people pleasure, I feed imaginations, I share beauty.
It has taken me a long time to become comfortable with sharing the spotlight with my work. I have always wanted to step to the side and let my work “speak for itself,” but I have come to understand that reading publicly is not about self-gratification, it’s about representing the work. It’s about staking a claim for the value of my writing. It’s about clearing a space in which my creativity can be heard. When I move forward with the understanding that self-promotion is not about me, I am freed to commit to the act of giving my work the opportunity to find it’s readers. Ultimately, I am responsible for letting the world know about my work. What happens next, is up to the readers. Each individual within earshot, can choose whether or not to interact with my writing, but if I don’t announce it, if I don’t share it, if I don’t put it out there, then no one even has the opportunity to engage with it.
I know that when I hold back and don’t share my insights as a writer, I am blocking my own expression and progress. Hiding away from promotions almost ensures that all the hard work I put into my craft will go unnoticed and unappreciated. I have too much respect for my efforts to squander away the possibilities of building a future for my writing. I now consider audience building as a component of my work as a writer. As long as I am writing, I will also be reading in support of my words, of my literary development, and of expanding the possibilities for my work.
This rum and dried fruit infused bread pudding is a great substitute for when you forgot to prepare your fruits in advance for traditional Caribbean Christmas black rum cake. In this Caribbean holiday bread pudding we’ll try to duplicate some of the traditional flavors of Caribbean black cake, but in record time. Chris from CaribbeanPot.com will show you his simple technique for making this amazing bread pudding, using old bread, a rich custard, alcohol infused dried fruits (dates, raisins, cherries, pineapple, papaya) and nuts (cashews and pecans).
For this rum bread pudding you’ll need…
1 large bread (cubed – remove crust)
3/4 cup sugar
5 eggs
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
pinch salt
2 cups milk (or heavy cream)
1/2 cup dried cherries
1/2 cup dried pineapple
1/2 cup dates
1/2 cup dried papaya
3/4 cup raisins
3/4 cup cashews
1/2 cup pecans
1.5 tablespoon vanilla
1.5 tablespoon mixed essence (optional)
* sherry / cognac 1/2 cup each for soaking the dried fruits – dark rum is the best substitute.
* flour/butter for preparing the baking pan
More Caribbean recipes can be found at http://www.caribbeanpot.com
Get my Gourmand Award winning cookbook, The Vibrant Caribbean Pot – 100 Traditional And Fusion Recipes Vol 2 @ http://www.CaribbeanPot.com/book/ or Amazon @ http://www.amazon.ca/Vibrant-Caribbea…
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To learn more about Chris De La Rosa, you can visit http://www.ChrisDeLaRosa.com
$25
A prize of $1,000 and publication by Schaffner Press is given annually for a poetry collection, a novel, a short story collection, an essay collection, or a memoir that “deals in some way with the subject of music and its influence.” Submit a poetry collection of approximately 60 pages, a short story collection of 50,000 to 80,000 words, a novel of 75,000 to 150,000 words, or an essay collection or memoir of 75,000 to 100,000 words with a $25 entry fee by December 31. E-mail or visit the website for complete guidelines.
Schaffner Press, Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature, P.O. Box 41567, Tucson, AZ 85717.
>via: http://www.pw.org/writing_contests/nicholas_schaffner_award_for_music_in_literature
$1,500 and publication in Boulevard awarded to the winning story by a writer who has not yet published a book of fiction, poetry, or creative non-fiction with a nationally distributed press.
We are happy to announce that the winning story of the 2014 Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers is Courtney Sender’s “The Disappearance of J. Frank Donaldson.”
Congratulations also to our honorable mentions: Dalia Rosenfeld for “Daughters of Respectable Houses” and Jill Logan for “Take Me to the Place Where They Buried Golden Cloud.”
Due to the number of submissions, we cannot respond to each writer individually. Please check the website for notification of the winner.
>via: http://www.boulevardmagazine.org/short-fiction-contest/
Flash Fiction, Flash Nonfiction, and Prose Poetry
Submissions for our first annual Redivider Blurred Genre Contest will open November 15 and close December 31. This contest explores the porous genre boundaries between flash fiction, flash nonfiction, and prose poetry. In doing so, we aim to nurture and celebrate commonality, difference, and distinction in literature. Each category will produce one winning entry, announced in February.
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$250 prize for Flash Fiction | $250 for Flash Nonfiction | $250 for Prose Poetry
Plus publication in Redivider!
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JUDGES
Pamela Painter for flash fiction
Jerald Walker for flash nonfiction
John Skoyles for prose poetry
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GUIDELINES
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For questions or comments, please contact our contest assistant at contests@redividerjournal.org
>via: http://www.redividerjournal.org/submit/contests/redivider-blurred-genre-contest/