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.