Then This is the Year

oh, i've made it, i've made it! 2007 is finally behind me. and even though there's a long road ahead of me, i feel better than i have in years. i remember sitting up late one night with Adam, probably in late 2005 (the "golden year"). the world seemed like it was positively exploding with possibility then, and we were swimming in the joy of new found friendship and ALL CITY, a new popular education organization on campus. but that night we talked about something else, the feeling that a difficult time was coming. the memory of those words is clear in my mind. we knew that what we had gained in the past two year or so would be put to the test.

for the next two years life came at the ALL CITY fam fast and hard. organizationally we fell apart, emotionally we were stretched thin. friendships were tested, some breaking, some strengthening, others warped out of shape by all the pressure that we radicals place on the few loving relationships. some of us moved, all of us were in motion. on all of our minds were questions about what to do with our lives, what kind of people we wanted to be, and how to escape the constraints that were suffocating us.

2007 has been the most intense and difficult year of my life (as far as i can remember). i broke up with the first man i had loved and been in an intimate relationship with, i left new york city and came to raleigh, and i lost one of my best friends. this whole year my emotions have been in high gear, violently fluctuating from ecstatic joy to morbid depression. i've never had a year where i had so many breakthroughs and so many breakdowns. 2007 took the unpackaged experiences of homelessness, dropping out of school, and being broke that had begun to fester in 2006 and exploded them. i lived 2007 in a cyclone of furious emotion.

through the entire process i was relentlessly forced to choose between my radical politics/imagination and an attitude of political cynicism and despair. this wasn't simply a choice between available options, it often meant building radical options where despair seemed like the only thing possible. somethin out of nothin, as they say.

but of course, it wasn't out of nothing. it was built from the love of my community. it was built from the conviction that i gained from experiencing profound change with others. it was built from the memory of the "impossible" obstacles that we have already overcome (don't forget them!). from the faith in the irrepressable tenacity of the human spirit.

it's been a struggle, but as the new year opens i am more clear about who i am and where i'm going. and this isn't divorced from a clearer understanding of the political possibilities and strategies of our times. the process of authentic self-discovery is inextricable from the process of social analysis. as i've clarified what it means to be authentically myself, i've deepened my convictions about what justice and dignity mean.

my explorations of queer politics, the (regional) geography of race, feminist materialism, US history, economics, and participatory democracy (phew!) has sharpened my understanding of the possibilities of revolution in this country. wanna know more? come visit me in n carolina. can't come to the South? well stay tuned. the dispatches will only get better from here forward.

If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
-from "Imagine the Angels of Bread,"

over and out,
Don Petro de Vagabundencia

We Ain't Crazy

gaslighting: to manipulate someone into questioning their own sanity; to subtly drive someone crazy.

the term 'gaslighting'

was coined from the 1940 film Gaslight in which changes in gas light levels are experienced several times by the main character. The classic example in the film is the character Gregory using the gas lamps in the attic, causing the rest of the lamps in the house to dim slightly; when Paula comments on the lights' dimming, she is told she is imagining things. Paula believes herself alone in the house when the dimming occurs, unaware that Gregory has entered the attic from the house next door, and is searching for jewels he believes to be hidden there. The sinister interpretation of the change in light levels is part of a larger pattern of deception to which the character Paula is subjected. (wikipedia)

to gaslight someone means to deny some fudamental perception of reality that they have in such a way that the person begins to question their ability to grasp reality. this is no mere difference of interpretation. two people could disagree and deny each other's interpretations of an event without gaslighting one another. but things get twisted when someone begins undermining the other person's confidence in their capacity to come to conclusions about reality.

gaslighting is one of the most insidious forms of power. it is used to silence and to discredit the experiences of others so that nothing need change in the real nature of the relationship. it is a refusal to be held accountable to how a one person's behavior affects others.

gaslighting requires either the participation or the complicit silence of large groups of people. this is because a single denial of someone else's experience of reality can only make them feel crazy if other people who they depend on participate in this denial or add to the victim's sense of isolation by maintaining silence. not only one, but many others need to contest or ignore the person's understanding of everyday experiences.

a shop clerk follows me around the store, re-arranging items on the shelves and watching my every move. i tell an acquaintance that this was racist. i am told that i am being paranoid, that i am being oversensitive, since there's nothing to prove that the clerk was responding to my appearance. whether or not this is true, the important thing is that my perception of racism is completely denied. no account is made of why it is that i've come to this conclusion or what life experiences of mine and of others have developed this point of view.

a "friend" asks me what kind of statement i'm trying to make by not combing my hair or shaving. i defensively ask why i can't simply not want to comb or shave. i am told that i am overly hostile, that it is a "harmless question" with no intention of telling me how i should relate to my own body. of course, later on i am told that i would be beautiful if i cut my hair. this is not the first or the only time this conversation has gone just this way, yet when i point out that these questions are actually acts designed to police my appearance, i am told that i am "imagining things", that no one is trying to exercise power over me, that i am "crazy".

the point (whether or not the gaslighting is intentional) is that the victim begins to seriously question her/his own everyday perceptions and feelings about important events. it becomes particularly sinister in intimate relations of abuse. "was it actually rape or am i being dramatic?" "did he actually abuse me?"

these are not the questions of a critical consciousness, they are questions that unhinge independent consciousness. for when we begin to question our own ability to come to conclusions about reality, then we must rely on someone else's interpretation and we must silence the questions that our own experience raises. most often this takes the form of distrusting our own emotions, of treating them as if they are wildly unreasonable responses to what we are going through because others say that what is happening to us is not cause for an emotional response.

shall we consider it a coincidence that the person who is gaslighting also stands to benefit from erasing the uneasy reality of emotions, from having the world interpreted from his/her perspective? i think not.

Gustavo Gutiérrez writes that the memory of the poor is subversive because "it lends force and sustenance to our positions, refuses to compromise or equivocate, learns from failures, and knows (by experience) that it has the capability of overcoming every obstacle, even repression itself" ("Avoiding Historical Amnesia" in Gutiérrez: The Essential Writings). in this same sense, perception is also subversive, since it helps us to establish a sense of self. i believe, having our own perceptions of reality, our own points of reference, is a prerequisite to being subjects in our own lives and in history.

we know about the political importance of looking at society from the perspective of the oppressed, but i think that we often fail to recognize the ways that denial of experience in our everyday relationships is also often a matter of power and politics, a way that the experiences of certain groups (in my experience women and queer folks) are buried and silenced in so many individuals so that those who benefit from the do not have to face the reality of their unjust treatment of others.

time and again i've found myself thinking that i'm crazy because everyone around me is telling me that i'm being unreasonable, that i'm overreacting, or they are simply silent when the situation calls for outrage. it's at times like these that friends are most important. because through witnessing, through affirming one another's experiences (though not always one another's interpretations) of reality, we help sustain the identity, memory, and insight that is the root of radical social action.

I Cultivate You

in isolation
I cultivate you black
Magma me noneness
like the lips
of my
nobody kiss me
love

and from friction
glowing ember I see
You:
small smoke
Tower,
dark
Pillar of combustion
irritation

in isolation
I cultivate you

black

Magma me

noneness

Tooth Decay: A Moral/Social Dilemma

today i went to the dentist and found out that, even though my teeth appear to be healthy ("textbook!" said the nurse), beneath the surface many of them are full of deep cavities. it's been about two years since i went to the dentist and i figured that it would just be a routine cleaning. alas, alas. at first the nurse was jubilant about my beautiful teeth. but when she was cleaning there was this incredibly sensitive spot in the upper right of my mouth. when she took the x-rays it turns out that one tooth up there has got a cavity damn near the nerve and that in the rest of my back teeth there are a ton of other developing cavities between the teeth where they are readily seen (and where i rarely floss).

turns out i need about $6,000 worth of dental work. damn. a root canal, post, and crown in the real sensitive tooth and fillings in a bunch of other places. but it wasn't just the money or the prospect of having needles and drills stuck in my mouth. there was also a profoundly moral subtext to the entire visit.

when i was being complimented on my teeth i felt like my lifestyle was being affirmed. as if the health of my teeth was the symbol of the integrity of my character. when it was discovered that i had rampant tooth decay (oh, the words are even painful to write!) the whole mood of the visit changed. i felt ashamed. the doctor came in and gave me "the look" and told me how much it pained him to see perfect teeth like these shot through with cavities.

"what have you been doing in the past two years that could have done all this damage?" they asked, and i almost broke down and cried. the past two years? i've been struggling to survive and wondering if it wouldn't be better to die. that's what i thought to myself. but a dentist chair is not a therapist's couch. no, it's more like a confessor's booth. where i divulge my sins. "yes, it is true, i was (am?) a sugar addict."

"forgive me!" i wanted to shout. "have mercy!" i knew i had to have the surgeries, but must they be accompanied with all this guilt?

some context: the past two years have been difficult. i came out to my family. i dropped out of school. i was chronically unemployed. i was struggling through a hard relationship. i was depressed almost all the time. and then, there was the crushing loneliness.

i dealt with it all in really unhealthy ways, mostly through abusing/neglecting my body. i would not eat, or i would eat massive amounts of sugar. i wouldn't sleep and i'd let myself get dehydrated to the point of fainting. i wouldn't bathe or brush my teeth for days. i took out a mortgage on my health in order to pay the bills for my sanity, and now the debt has piled up.

i began trying to change my habits because of two little health crises. the first was when my entire back and my arms broke out in pimples. i figured my body was going crazy trying to get rid of all the toxins i was eating. after that i seriously began to cut back on sugar. then the second thing was a dehydration-enduced fever i got from cleaning all day at work at not taking water or food at all.

after these two miserable run ins, i tried to change my habits. and to my credit, i've kicked my sugar habit and i am drinking a lot more water regularly. i still don't eat as often as i should, but i'm working on that too.

anyhow, the question arises, in all of this, if this is all a matter of personal responsibility. i know that i have to change, for sure. it's my life, after all. but after my initial shame and sadness about it all, i got angry too. because i sacrificed my health in an effort to find some little bit of comfort from an incredibly lonely and rough set of circumstances. how we deal with stress is, in a number of ways, a personal responsibility. but the fact that we are faced with so much of it and that we are presented with such a limited range of choices is a social problem.

meanwhile candy companies and dentist-confessors get rich.

Untitled

once
Again
the sun rises
and hammers gold leaf
into the Carolina horizon

the geese fly south
once
More
because their task is never finished

Homage to the Unfinished Creation!

arise, my human heart
for you too repeat your dignity through labor
to flight, o human hands
for justice is never done being established

I Asked About His Belly Button: Words & Sex

i don't like cheap sex, even in words. i don't like touching bodies that i can't write poetry about. and i think that's because these are largely two ways of doing the same thing. if they aren't then they are each one way of engaging in something that i don't want: cheap sensation.

this may seem obvious or idealistic or irrelevant. "sex is sex," you say (perhaps with despair, perhaps with indifference, perhaps with a rising libido). but nothing about sex became obvious to me until i'd done it (or come terribly close to doing it), thought about it, written something about it, forgotten everything (on purpose?), realized i'd done it again, read what i wrote and finally decided i wanted to be fully present as myself the next time.

oh, but there are terrible costs to being present. it makes you "erotically at risk" (as Adrienne Rich wrote). and this because bodies ask relentless questions that minds don't often like to hear.

Exhibit A: i once asked a man laying naked on my bed about his hands because his hands kept asking questions of me. they were lying (spelling intended) there next to him, then they were dancing over me, then i was using my hands to ask them about their childhood. then i opened my mouth and said something about fingers and truth. well, i soon found out that i'm not "supposed" to do that. that i'm supposed to just "do it," without words. i found out because he left and stopped talking to me altogether.

i thought about that (which was difficult because when he left i was still horny), then i wrote about it, then i forgot it.

Exhibit B: a year later i fell for portuguese (oh, what a body of language!). my tongue never got very familiar, but fumbling words have never stopped me from trying to say what my heart means. i would say something with my head on his shoulder and then a word from my mouth when the shoulder went rigid and cold, speaking what i felt with my body. but no one appreciates amateur translations!

think, skip the writing, go straight to forgetting.

finally, i stopped believing that the tongue is an organ among organs and began to reluctantly accept that the tongue should not ejaculate or shudder. that is, i made the ultimate act of forgetting: disagreeing with my own beliefs in such a way that they appeared to me as though they came from outside.

flash forward (that happens a lot when you are actively forgetting). i find myself in bed with someone who doesn't ask questions at all. his body silently watches me from afar (proximity, my friends, is not the same thing as presence). we do not ever touch, really. the hand, the legs, the teeth, the mouths, the sphincter, penises make contact, but they are watching, not touching. when the heat got going they did, of course, talk...alot. we were verbose bodies--chattering, gossiping, gregarious bodies--but not bodies that asked questions. it was only cheap sex-words.

afterwards i remembered (inevitable) and i read what i had written years ago about hands. i dreamt of hands. my pores opened and closed asking for hands. i wrote poems about hands of all kinds. i decided that i want my words and my hands to be equally apt at asking questions. of telling secrets. not clever, not suave, but honest and slightly shaking from anticipation (or ecstasy). i decided to be present next time. to ask all sorts of body-word questions.

so i'm at risk again "because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger" (guess who said that). who knows what could happen? i'm scared that i will never meet anyone who sex-speaks and body-asks the way i do. but now i know that the sexual act without the sexual questions is empty for me. so what else is there to do but be honest?

i could try to forget again. but even that is hard to do these days. working at a seedy hotel i've been getting frequent propositions for blow jobs and anonymous sex. but despite the fact that this is supposedly every man's dream (especially every gay Black man, who is defined by sex, and is sex) i've found myself turned off. i want to know what they see in me (not just on me). what makes their eyes shine as well as what makes their thighs quake. and so far men have been stumped when they ask me what i'm "into" and i say things like this, since they expect a simple answer of top or bottom. there's no going back, only forward.

but there is hope. a few days ago i sent an email to someone who likes my words. i asked about his belly button. i don't even know him. but i would like him to know that i already have questions...

Revolutionaries Should Ride Public Transportation

even though most people working at public transporation information booths are counterrevolutionary (they show contempt for the masses), good revolutionaries should ride buses, trains, etc. why? because they are the people's lecture halls. wanna know what people think of their jobs? ride during morning or evening rush hour. you'll hear about overtime, corrupt management, and the guy who's afraid of operating the open flame grill.

wanna get an idea of gender relations? ride on the weekends when people are puttin on their best threads and going out. or get up early and ride with mothers as they take their kids to day-care. ride the bus to the public hospital to hear about healthcare. on public transporationa you'll learn about the police, religion, and cultural history. if you ride the same routes at the same time frequently, you're sure to begin making acquaintances who will discuss anything from Obama to lesbianism (just be ready to defend your position).

riding the buses in Raleigh i've been amazed at the range of conversation as well as the ways that different people participate. folks from the front will shout out obscure historical information to fill in a conversation that seemed to only involve two or three people sitting in the back. i remember reading about the soapbox speeches during the Harlem Renaissance and thinking "we don't have open air discussions like that anymore". in many ways that is true, but public transport is still a place where one can learn a great deal about society and the different views that people have.

now, some qualifiers. first, in places like NYC, where even Wall Street professionals ride the subways, public transportation doesn't have the same race/class/gender demographic as in Raleigh. here the buses are completely working class. in addition, probably 90% of the riders are Black, although the city population is nowhere near such proportions. finally, there tend to be a good deal more women than men.

so in places where cars are the more common mode of transportation, public transport is a great place where poor folks (particularly POC) air their thoughts about the world. i think it's incredibly important to experience this. the ways that people make arguments, what type of subjects are brought up and how. one learns about gentrification plans as well as how to cook great meals from fellow riders. you really get a feel for the people.

of course, i think it is also important to participate in these conversations. i found myself particularly engaged whenever workplace issues or politics were directly discussed (though i find myself more and more intervening in conversations about gender). and sometimes, even when i'm not planning on getting involved, someone spies what i'm reading and asks a question. today, for example, i was reading Capitalist Patriarchy & the Case for Socialist Feminism on my way to work. a young Black guy caught the title out of the corner of his eye and did a double take. he read it again and again and then spoke:

"is that book about society?" he asked.

"it's about how male dominance and the rule of the rich work in relation to one another," i answered.

"yeah, the rich get richer, man" he began and was off running. "these republicans, everytime they get in office things go wrong. did you know that Black people were making $5,000 more under Clinton than now?"

as i opened my mouth to make a connection between race, capitalist economic policy, conservative "family" policies (anti-abortion, anti-homosexual, etc), and the neoconservatives the bus arrived at my stop.

"i would love to talk to you more about this, bro, but i gotta go to work" i said and hopped off the bus.

who knows where things would have gone, but i know we would have had a conversation that could really mean something and deepen both our understandings of life in this society. if one is interested in revolutionary organic intellectual work, one should ride the buses.

The Nomadic Letters pt.1

Vagabond: somebody who has no permanent place to live and wanders from place to place.

When I first met Mingus he said that he could tell that I wasn't going to "stick around". When I first befriended Foressa she said that something about me told her not to get too close, because I wasn't going to stay in Raleigh. I suppose my search for something beyond wherever I am has always shown on my face or in my personality...

For those who don't know, I'm moving again. It's becoming a way of life for me. (I already hear the rumblings of the landlubbers: "why don't you settle down?" they say. To that I reply "avast ye scoundrel haters!"). I've made two big moves in my life. The first from Michigan to NYC, the second from NYC to Raleigh. Now I'm making it three with a move from Raleigh to Philly. It's an interesting experience, being a vagabond. For one, you learn who your friends are and who you really care about (by learning whether you/they are willing to do the work of love across distances). And you find out the amazing tenacity of the human soul. But really the vagabond life, for me, wasn't really about wanting to always be on the move. It's one of those "choices" that only makes sense if you know what the constraints are.

I have lived nomadically ever since I can remember. That is, I have always lived in someone else's world and on someone else's terms and, never wanting to accept these terms, I have been constantly (internally or externally) on the move. And this because I am different, because I dream and my dreams are demanding, making me irredemibly convinced of their objectivity.

[Radicalism, after all, is the ability to see the possible in the actual, the courage to announce the presence of Marvel, and the conviction whose strength allows us to sacrifice everything in order to make the possible a reality.]

Some men today announce that the world is flat. This is an inaccurate depiction of the state of social relations; inequality is rife. Yet it accurately describes the radical despair of an age in which the pharisees announce that "there are no alternatives" to misery. For those who accept the "end of history," the world is indeed flat. Pragmatism, utilitarianism, "realism"--all of these are forms of despair. they are the reduction of reality to actuality: the world deprived of meaning/The Marvelous.

Whenever such reductionism begins to crowd in around me I start itching for the open road where anything is indeed possible (even death).

Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that
would hold me. (Walt Whitman, "Song of the Open Road")

It is my refusal to accept an adaptive/accomodationist approach to life that started me wandering. And it has also been my rejection of the idea that "idealistic dreamers" must live on the periphery of society because everyone else is happy with mediocrity. No, I sense that there is something stirring in all of us longing for Marvel, Wonder, Awe. There is something brave and daring at the root of being human and I mean to learn its name so that, in speaking it, I may stir the hearts of others to reject inheritance and embrace creation.

And why should I not believe in the soundness of such reason? I recall the archetypes of my delirious wilderness visions when I listen to stories of hope and desperation in the houses of the destitute--both were about a different place, and a self almost too magnificent to believe in. A new world. Salvation. The name for that place and that self are forgoteen. Yet we all make fools of ourselves grasping for a word or a phrase to commincate our experience of them to others.

The vagabond is the one who decides to utter nonsense, collect "supersitions", to take every map, every scrap of information, every hunch, dream, legend and story and set out on a search for the longed for place and self: the human being and the just society. S/he soon discovers that it is not one but many places, not one, but many selves; holy sites where various peoples have imbued the world with dreams and hope and courage. The vagabond thus becomes a pilgrim to the holy sites of wo/men and communities, an initiate to humanity's charished dreams of dignity.

For some just the taste of the possible is enough. But the vagabond is drawn to something more, beyond journeys and the holy sites. From each mosque/body/university/landscape that is holy s/he has gathered a hint of something deeper. Each experience of tranquility and understanding, each thrashing moment of terror and mercy, each desperate or grateful prayer--all of these are but single intimations of something greater.

A whisper of grandeur rends his heart with beauty. It may sound absurd but the experience of a landscape, of poverty, even the smell of ginger compel her to ask "by what principle do we continue to live?" "why doesn't the earth relent and fall out of orbit?" "for whom was the human soul crafted with such endurance?" "why, oh why, do i still dream of freedom?"

Searching, wandering. I believe that people, places, and answers are connected. Travelling is a way of moving between ways of living, which is another way of saying ways of asking questions.

Ogun & Duende (revised)

once i woke up in the middle of the night and Ogun was there, crouching in the corner of my room. his body was blacker than the darkness and emanating from his pupil-less eyes were beams of hellish light that split the room with a horizon of blood.

my image of Ogun, the Yoruba orisa (spirit/god) best known as the patron of war, has always been terrifying. i always tried to avoid him because he was associated with violence and, in my mind, brutality. but yesterday i realized that i've been making my way closer and closer to the abode of this orisa for almost a year now.

it's been happening as i become angrier and angrier about oppression. there is a rage in me that i have ignored for a long time. but now it's beginning to make itself known. wage labor will do that to you. hahaha. it's been a real struggle figuring out what to do with anger. my first step was to (re)read Audre Lorde's "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism." she writes:

Women of Color in america have grown up within a symphony of anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its service. And I say symphony rather than cacophony because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart. We have had to learn to move through them and use them for strength and force and insight within our daily lives. Those of us who did not learn this difficult lesson did not survive. And part of my anger is always libation for my fallen sisters.

but how? but how? but how? sometimes i felt my anger unhinging me. the abyss stared back. my survival is/was threatened by oppression and by my not knowing how to orchestrate the fury. words often failed me. dialogue collapsed. i found myself unable to articulate the tremendous force growing in me.

it was then that i discovered duende and, through it, rediscovered the Word. duende, simply defined, is the dark creative force. it is a force of creativity that cannot be brought out through calm, elegant or contemplative art/thought. instead it emerges in desperation. creation as an act of survival, necessity, even agony. one is not "inspired" by duende, one struggles with it for survival (for it is liable to tear one apart). art is produced through struggle with duende, not as a peaceful partnership with it.

such a force--sometimes manifesting as anger, sometimes as despair, sometimes as yearning--rips through our elaborate facades of identity and pretense. gone are the easy, gregarious words and thoughts that we used to stave off the impending darkness. our sense of self begins to dissolve, the world gathers close at the smell of blood. what will we do?

in order to fight with the dark creative force, you must shriek and mourn. you must utter a dirge that makes words tremble and melt into their primordial forms.

the Word comes when the poet is trembling, begging for relief from the relentless meanings of 'objects' that take up residence within, denying any space for a 'subject'. when the sheer immensity of perception threatens existence, when the senses become so full and sensitive that the consciousness of being one who perceives is almost blotted out, the Word is an act of survival that bids the world to have mercy that commands the world to make a place for consciousness among and within perception itself.

when i stopped using words to escape and began to use them to survive; when words became extensions of suffering and hope rather than tools for communicating suffering and hope; when i broke with the smug comfort of those who call language "arbitrary" or "symbolic" and realized that my words were my experience, then i found that i could struggle with my duende. i found my voice again (or perhaps for the first time).

and with that voice i began to weep, caress, struggle with, beg, and transform the world. such words are radical. they are the words of which Paulo Freire speaks; true words which, when spoken, change the world.

enter Ogun...

yesterday i was writing a journal entry about being a nomad and a single line brought me face to face with the orisa from whom i have run so long: "In choosing migration over accomodation," i wrote "the vagabond can, if s/he is brave, open the road to freedom." it immediately struck me that i was talking about Ogun, the orisa who "opens the road" with his machete. any other time in my life i would have fled from the invocation of Ogun in my work or my life. but now, as a result of being acquainted with duende, i am prepared to open myself up to the spirit of Ogun.

i began doing research into the meaning of Ogun. the most interesting stuff i found was around the work of Wole Soyinka, African novelist and playwright. this is what one author understands of Soyinka's reading of Ogun:

god of war and the hunt, of iron, protector of artistic spirit, god of transition, the explorer god, the god of the road. Ogun is contradictory, a being of compassion and anger whose reason for being is the impossible--to close the gap of understanding between gods and people, between cultures, and ideologies. ("Following Wole Soyinka")

and Soyinka himself writes

On the arena of the living, when man is stripped of excrescences, when disasters and conflicts (the material of drama) have crushed and robbed him of self-consciousness and pretensions, he stands in present reality at the spiritual edge of this gulf, he has nothing left in physical existence which successfully impresses upon his spiritual or psychic perception. It is at such moment that transitional memory takes over and intimations rack him of that intense parallel of his progress through the gulf of transition, of the dissolution of his self and his struggle and triumph over subsumation through the agency of will...We have said that nothing but the will (for that alone is left untouched) rescues being from annihilation within the abyss. Ogun is embodiment of Will, and the Will is the paradoxiacal truth of destructiveness and creativeness in acting man. Only one who has himself undergone the experience of disintegration, whose spirit has been tested and whose psychic resources laid under stress by forces most inimical to individual assertion, only he can understand and be the force of fusion between the two contradictions." (Soyinka, "The Fourth Stage")

the connection between this idea of Ogun and my own life for the past two years is incredible. my attempts to try new ideas, to connect spirituality and politics, and to express my rage and my love; my migrations, depressions, joys, and refusals to accomodate myself to a world that negates me---all of these have been journeys into and beyond the abyss.

Frederico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet, wrote about the role of such abyssmal struggle in the truly human creative arts. For him duende was the essence of certain art forms, particularly cante jondo (deep song), the passionate music of the Andalusian gypsies (a music form carried on, in some ways, by flamenco). He wrote this (a favorite passage of mine) about a woman whose song was moved by duende:

Then La Niña de Los Peines got up like a madwoman, trembling like a medieval mourner, and drank, in one gulp, a huge glass of fiery spirits, and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, colour, but…with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand, that make listeners tear at their clothes with the same rhythm as the Negroes of the Antilles in their rite, huddled before the statue of Santa Bárbara.

the "negroes of the Antilles," of course, were Black orisa spiritualists. Santa Bárbara is actually a representation of Chango, rather than Ogun, but the allusion to Black/African based manifestations of this same spiritual source is there.

the point here is that human beings have developed ways of engaging these profound experiences and forces. art and religion, with their powerful ritualism, seem to be the heart of this cultural wisdom.

Audre Lorde tells us that we must learn to orchestrate our anger in order to survive, these traditions offer us guidance as to how this can be done. overcoming my fear of rage/anger i now see that an exploration of Ogun is essential to my development.

perhaps i shall make my cast iron pot a home for Ogun after all...

Lookin' Good!

Sean told me that my blog made his eyes feel crazy because the contrast was so high and the words so small. so, over the past few days i've been playing with the layout and the color scheme. and i am finally pleased with the result: viola!

watcha think darlings?

Carolina, I Leave in December

Autumn is ending
and the oaks and maples yield your seasonable blood so that half of heaven and a small part of earth might not doubt the truth of your deciduous stigmata. The ochre and crimson wines of your covenant intoxicate the soil with color. The pantheon of your stoic pines looks on without a sound, but amongst them how one can smell the weeping sap!

It is true, Carolina, I leave in December. I go to learn the words that make money tremble. Yet I write to you aching with the choice I have made, hoping that you will not forsake me. My absence does not mean that I do not love you.

Do not vacate my senses as the season gives way. Instead, prepare in me the justice of your repeating forests. Do not abandon my memory. Remain in me always with your clayskin of rust and your tonic water with its galaxy of minerals. Fix me, oh Carolina, with the courage of your egalitarian skies.

Violence, The 'Private' Life of Patriarchy

the elevator doors opened and a woman and her little girl (probably 5-6 years old) walked into the hotel lobby. the little girl smiled at me and i waved in a big exaggerated way and put on a goofy grin. she giggled and waved back. her mother stood by the windows, presumably waiting for someone. eventually a young man with dreadlocks came into the hotel and together they walked back to the elevator and up to their room. trailing behind was the little girl who stared at me until i said goodnite. she returned the phrase and skipped into the elevator.

flash forward. someone calls the front desk from the first floor complaining that upstairs there has been a constant banging and arguing. as i prepare to go upstairs and check on the problem the young man from earlier enters the hotel and tells me that he lost his key (to rm 227) and needs another copy. something in me is suspicious but i don't know what it is. i ask if the room is in his name. it's not. he says it's in his "baby mama's" name. i say i need to call first and he says that no one is in the room at the moment. another alarm goes off but i ignore it since i don't know quite what it's about. against what i should have done, i make him a key.

i head upstairs to check on the noise that the other guest had told me about. i take the stairs and as i come out of the stair well i see a trail of condoms (still in the wrappers) leading to rm 227. it's only then that i realize that the "disturbance" was between the young man who i had just given the key and the woman who had rented the room. the young man got off the elevator and tried to open the door, but the chain lock was engaged. for the next minute he argued with her to let him in and i stood there like an idiot not knowing what to do. she eventually let him in.

i headed back down to the front desk in confusion. what to do? then i get a call from rm 227. the caller hangs up when i answer. frightened i call back. he answers the phone and i ask who had called. he puts the woman on the phone but she is crying so hard she can't speak and eventually the phone hangs up. i run upstairs immediately.

"you beat my ass, you deserve to get beat" says a woman's voice wracked with emotion. i knock on the door.

"who is it?" he asks.

"front desk" i say. she whimpers and he tells her to shush. the door opens.

"what?"

"i got a complaint about the noise and i need to check if everything is ok." i step into the room. it's trashed. items strewn about, the chair laying in the floor with the bed sheets. the woman is sitting on the bed with her daughter trying not to cry. i ask if she is alright.

"yes, thank you" she says and i know it's not true but don't know what to do. i feel that i need her permission to put him out or call the police. i don't know how to act without her direction. but obviously something is very wrong. should i stay out of it? intervene? i need direction but don't know where to look for it. i leave and the door closes behind me.

the arguing begins again.

"you see, you're gonna get me locked up" he yells.

"stop touching me" she pleads. "please stop touching me. you don't know how hard you were hitting me. please, just get out of my life. you can stay the night but please stay away from me. stop kissing me, it's over." my heart breaks. what can i do?

for the rest of the night i try to check in. once i even knock citing a fictitious call from another guest. but this time she seems more adament that nothing is wrong. have i made things worse? i remember hearing that people often make things worse for the victims because the abusers get angry at being exposed or having their private power challenged and they take it out on the abused when no one is around. maybe i'm making it worse.

maybe it's wrong to think of her as a victim. she knows what she's doing, i think to myself, much better than i do. i should follow her lead and stop fumbling around without a real plan of how to make things better. clearly i'm not being helpful. but how does one act in this situation?

this isn't a sporadic issue. this is the third time in 7 months at this hotel that i've had to make decisions about how to deal with abusive men (the others were a boy-"friend" and a pimp). each time i felt totally unprepared and knew i hadn't handled it right.

there's this whole "private" world in which violence and abuse and neglect goes on and the strategies of intervention aren't simple. perhaps it's true that the only real way to intervene is to powerfully support the women in our lives so that if they are in a similar situation they can reach out to us. and i think it also means making a choice to be a part of the lives of working-class and poor women and women of color and living in a way that opens spaces (physical, emotional, intellectual) that puts issues of healing and empowerment front and center while being critical of patriarchy.

of course, what does that commitment mean on a night like this? i wish i knew...i think of my friend Calvin who, as a child, saw his father tie his mother to a chair and beat her. who last i heard was locked up for threatening his own girlfriend with a gun in front of his son. i think of how bravely that little girl smiled. and i commit myself to making the world better.

The International Conspiracy of Haters

ever been having a really good time and out of nowhere an ex-lover calls and stirs up shitty feelings? ever been getting into a good groove in life and then on your way to the grocery store you run into an old friend who betrayed you? ever felt that this was no coincidence? that whenever you are beginning to really feel good some ghost of the past tries to drag you back into despair? well, i'm here to tell you that it is no accident. there is a conspiracy, an International Conspiracy of Haters (ICH)!

deep beneath the pentagon in washington DC is a headquaters--a nerve center, if you will--where ex-lovers, Henry Louis Gates, bigots, nay-sayers, bosses, pharisees, and (of course) Bill Cosby keep tabs on what we are up to. they rely on the ex-lovers to plant a heart-rate device in your chest. usually they do it by placing the microscopic technology in their mouths and then kissing you. then, from the nerve center they monitor your serotonin levels and heart rate. when you seem to be happy an alarm goes off.

BRIIINNNGGGG! WHHOOOOOO! RRRRRAAAAANNNNNNNGGGGG!

"Quick" says Condoleesa, "we need an ex-lover at Park & 23rd St in NYC. Subject 667 is escaping her depression!"

"Dispatching an ex-lover and a childhood enemy immediately," says the 4th grade english teacher who told you your poetry was bad. "We're also re-routing the public transportation system so that she misses the date with her best friend. We'll say it's a mechanical problem."

"Be sure to close her favorite restaurant and kill the phone lines so she has no way to cope," says the ICH agent who hit you with the shopping cart in the checkout line and pretended that she hadn't done it. "Last time when we scheduled that marathon to keep her out of the park she ended up having a empowering conversation with her grandmother instead. We can't afford mistakes like that people!" Alvaro Uribe and Orville Redenbacher nod in agreement while they smoke cigars (this pairing may seem strange, but consider the fact that the popcorn magnate was a ruling member of the ConAgra Foods global empire, with plantations throughout Latin America. In addition, he engineered his popcorn husks to lodge themselves in your gums.)

from their den of wickedness they intercept your phone calls to the customer service center so that they can fuck with your phone bill. they pop buttons off your favorite shirts while you're sleeping. they create localized earthquakes so that you spill spaghetti sauce on your white pants. they're the ones who turned off your alarm clock the day you were supposed to get up early and finish your paper for school or study for that test. (in fact they are the ones who kept you up all night by insitgating the drunken party next door). they invented lawn ornaments and MLA citation. bad luck? i think not! it's the ICH always at work trying to hold you down. how else do you explain the proliferation of artifical plants and flowers?

well my fellow sufferers, it's time to fight back! i've been tracking the sinister agenda of this clandestine organization for years now and i've developed a plan of action. to begin with you've got to get schizo when they deploy well-planned txt msgs from haters you once loved. reply only in surrealist imagery. if the ICH causes you to miss your plane flight, be sure to email a love letter to the person you were too afraid to tell how you felt. we've also got to think strategically. defeating Felipe Calderón in Mexico is essential to derailing the ICH plan to close off all possibilities of a meeting between you and your Chiapan soul mate, not to mention their attempts to frustrate all forms of authentic love.

don't drink bottled water! it's not really from a spring, it's from the Great Lakes (public property) and they add chemicals to it that cause existential angst. whenever you are afraid of telling the truth about your feelings, fight the power! fear is a subliminal reaction to nanotechnology devices that the ICH has put into most of the things and people that you most need to open up to (as well as green vegetables). it works like those sound devices that emit high frequency noises that keep away rodents (or like a dog whistle).

try not to take the same routes to work, school, or home. switch it up here and there. take a ride to somewhere you have no reason going and think about your life in uncommon places. the ICH is less likey to have planted agents there. blame everything on your period (men, don't forget to "accidentally" drop your tampon on the way to the bathroom as you pass your manager). subject disney movies to serious materialist analysis.

talk kindly to as many strangers as possible. many naive ICH operatives posing as "strangers" in your life joined the force because they were embittered by life (probably by previous ICH agents). but you can sometimes win them over when you spontaneously give them a flower (real flowers only, which you should purchase or pick periodically to surprise someone who isn't your lover. to surprise your lover, lick them behind the ear in public).

whatever you do DO NOT DESPAIR! outside the confines of the way of life you have been made accustomed to are the untested possibilities of an unfinished world. the world is neither good nor evil, it is Marvelous. how you live in it is of the utmost importance in how you perceive it. this doesn't mean you shouldn't cry or get angry. in fact, make sure that you honetly live your emotions. but don't waste the experience! as Audre Lorde said, one should never waste anything, especially pain.

say something blasphemous so that only those who love God will laugh with you. scandalize the pharisees! speak in spanish when you answer questions in class and at the drive thru window at the bank. be a race traitor without abandoning the fight for liberation. draw maps of the US where the Southeast is its own territory and the Southwest is either part of Mexico or completely independent. lie about where you are from.

above all engage in homoerotic displays of affection.
sodomía o muerte!
venceremos!

war on the ruling class & Oprah Winfrey!
denounce the middle-class collaborators!
forward with handicap accessible buildings!
down with the International Conspiracy of Haters!

over and out.
don petro de vagabundencia
(try finding that on a map Bill O'Reilly, cuz that's where the reconquista is coming from)

City Myths & Yuppies

this past sunday i visited San Francisco, supposed gay Mecca of the US. well, it was somebody's Mecca but it sure as hell wasn't mine! yuppies, yuppies everywhere. geesh. as me and Angel walked the streets of the Mission district it took everything we had not to release all the pent up anger that was raging inside of us on the nearest bicycle-riding, hemp-wearing, eco-friendly, barefoot, i'm-a-walking-revolution gentrifier. and you know what else? i realized that i HATE it when comfortable gay white folks go around talking about how great it is to be "free" in a place where the oppression of poor folks and POC is plain as day. i think the thing that enrages me the most is the air of innocence that yuppies and hippified yuppies have about them. James Baldwin once wrote

"it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

"Now, my dear namesake, these innocent and well-meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not very far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago. (I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, “No! This is not true! How bitter you are!”—but I am writing this letter to you, to try to tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist. I know the conditions, under which you were born, for I was there. Your countrymen were not there, and haven’t made it yet." (from "My Dungeon Shook")

and this is precisely the problem i had with San Francisco. though we walk by one another in "integrated" neighborhoods, we couldn't be farther from each other. my rage is proportional to the innocence. coming in, the gentrifiers push us out. always coming, never arriving. they haven't made it yet.

the city is swarthed in a myth of freedom; its very name is a myth. once, after being pelted with food from a car of Black men here in Raleigh i told a friend that i didn't know if i could take it anymore. he suggested i go somewhere more homo-friendly. perhaps San Francisco. the name was uttered like a prophecy, the image invoked a talisman warding off despair. but i had heard it before. people spoke of New York City as a magic place as well.

of course NYC has its own myth. New York is a metropole, a capitalist citadel. it boasts to be cosmopolitan, the noisy clash of cultures and identities running together, all reaching for wealth or survival. San Fracisco invokes the ideals of co-existence and harmony, NYC is a city of cacophony.

and to these cities come the young urban professionals, the innocents. mostly white but heavily spiced with black and brown phenotypes. they come, singing the myths of their cities. culture, creativity, art, diversity are their mantras. beneath the sound of The Song is the grinding of change that is not beautiful: removal, poverty. diversity turns out to be racism, plain, if not simple.

i went to some book stores hoping to find something rare, something that i would only find in the Gay City. to no avail. it seems Barnes & Noble in Kalamazoo, MI has just as much radicalism about homosexuality as the famed city of San Fran. i wanted to shop for used clothes, but i couldn't stomach it, as the thrift shops opened their doors beneath the windows of luxury condos.

as the sun went down the police came out and put brown intoxicated bodies in patrol cars. me and Angel retreated to Oakland, where the little old Korean ladies take the bus and where we could breathe some.

there's something disturbing about a place that shrieks peace and liberty to the sky but invokes such resentment so deeply in us. i remember something once said in Africa about colonialism that pronounced its benevolence: it is a "policy of smiling and bloodshed".

but this isn't to say that Cali was all bad. not at all. i loved most of what i saw. i especially appreciated being in a racial demographic that i was previously totally unaquainted with. when i went to the middle school where Angel mentors, i realized that for the first time i was in a school that was majority Latin@. (i guess that could have happened in NYC, but it happened for me in E. Oakland). the school yard, surrounded by low angled roofs reminded me of a school i had visited in Ghana.

and then there were the hills. and the trees whose layers stood in stark relief in the light of the street lamps. like immense paper cut-outs. there is, then, a place of marvel behind the narrative myths. i think i'd like to return someday. just not to San Fracisco.

Oakland, CA

so, for the past two days i've been visiting my friend Angel here in Oakland, Cali. he's attending graduate school here pursuing his Ph.D. in education. yesterday he invited me to sit in on his research group where folks come to present what they are working on and to get criticism and suggestions. in a lot of ways it was a demystifying experience. i got to see that the intellectual work that i do outside the academy is just as rigorous as what's being done in grad schools (and sometimes more so).

what i did see that i felt was a particular advantage for academic intellectuals was an environment of criticism. folks took turns presenting their ideas and having other people really push them to be clear and to take firm intellectual positions.

after going to Angel's school i sat with one of his friends, Ronald, and had one of the best intellectual conversations i've had in a long time. it wasn't so much that i haven't had powerful discussions, just that it's been a very long time since i've sat with two or more people and really hashed out important thoughts and questions.

hanging here with Angel and his friends has given me hope about the possibilities for engaging conversations between organic intellectuals (those of us who making our living doing 'non-intellectual' work but who love working on ideas) and popular intellectuals (those who make their living from doing academic work but who do it in the interests of revolution). and it reminds me how much i love a good discussion.