geniuschild

“I think of being Black not so much as an ethnic category but as an oppositional force or touchstone for looking at situations differently. Black culture has always been oppositional and is all about finding ways to creatively resist oppression here, in the most racist country in the world. So, when I speak of a Black anarchism, it is not so tied to the color of my skin but who I am as a person, as someone who can resist, who can see differently when I am stuck, and thus live differently.” -Ashanti Alston

lareviewofbooks:

MATTHEW SPECKTOR

James Baldwin cc Allan Warren 1969

He missed the first class. In fact, he missed the first three. In his place came an emissary, a small, solemn fellow who cocked his head and closed his eyes and explained how Mr. Baldwin has been detained in Paris. I was nineteen, and had only a cursory understanding of who “Mr. Baldwin” really was. I’d read Giovanni’s Room, and passages of The Fire Next Time had been drilled into me by a zealous Marxist high school teacher, but really I was fascinated, and not a little appalled, by whatever it was that allowed someone to blow off his own students so comprehensively. “Mr. Baldwin” was late. In fact he would show up only five times during the semester’s allotted sixteen weeks, so what was I doing sitting in a classroom with someone I won’t name, but whose own credits amounted (at least as I measured them then) to a single novelization of a famous Blaxploitation movie? This wasn’t the person I’d come to study with, for whom I took a thirty minute bus ride every week from my own campus to Mt. Holyoke College’s. There were fifteen people in the class, three from each of the five schools in our consortium. We’d been chosen by lottery. And week upon week, we’d go and we’d wait and at last James Baldwin’s factotum would come in and apologize, sort of, for the great man’s absence.

I don’t really remember anything about his classes, this substitute’s, except that they involved a great deal of silence and contempt. His, presumably, for our soft, white entitlement, and mine, entirely premature, for his failure to be someone famous. My entitlement was my contempt, in other words, which made his fully justified. I recall the whole mode of those classes as being essentially oracular, and though whatever he said, this oracle, this substitute prophet, is lost to time, he seemed to spend the few hours every week closing his eyes and intoning something, various things, about the Art of Fiction. I do not remember turning in any writing, those first few weeks. I do not remember being asked for any. This class was, nominally, a workshop, but it became for a while a sort of dispiriting, faithless church. We were told things about how to write. We wrote them down, I think. These words were, by implication, Baldwin’s. But we never knew for sure.

Eventually, he came. At the beginning of the fourth week, I straggled down the waxy hallway and found — for whatever reason, I was early — James Baldwin, standing on the threshold of his own classroom as if he were confused about whether he should enter it. There was no one else there. And of course, I recognized him, slowed down so that I could light a cigarette, which at the very least would prevent me from doing or saying something stupid, would give me something to do besides ogle the famous writer. He came over and he took my hand and he cupped it between both of his own so that he could, likewise, use my match. He didn’t say anything. And he didn’t release my hand for a good fifteen seconds. The moment had a frieze-like quality, and was also a form of automatic seduction. I was charmed, by someone whose charm felt general. He took me in, by which I mean turned those bulbous eyes in my direction, and then introduced himself finally. It was an intimate moment without any intimacy in it. I’m not sure I’ve ever mattered less to another human being.

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by Audre Lorde

The difference between poetry and rhetoric

is being ready to kill

yourself

instead of your children.

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds

and a dead child dragging his shattered black

face off the edge of my sleep

blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders

is the only liquid for miles

and my stomach

churns at the imagined taste while

my mouth splits into dry lips

without loyalty or reason

thirsting for the wetness of his blood

as it sinks into the whiteness

of the desert where I am lost

without imagery or magic

trying to make power out of hatred and destruction

trying to heal my dying son with kisses

only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.

A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens

stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood

and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and

there are tapes to prove it. At his trial

this policeman said in his own defense

“I didn’t notice the size nor nothing else

only the color”. And

there are tapes to prove that, too.

Today that 37 year old white man

with 13 years of police forcing

was set free

by eleven white men who said they were satisfied

justice had been done

and one Black Woman who said

“They convinced me” meaning

they had dragged her 4’10” black Woman’s frame

over the hot coals

of four centuries of white male approval

until she let go

the first real power she ever had

and lined her own womb with cement

to make a graveyard for our children.

I have not been able to touch the destruction

within me.

But unless I learn to use

the difference between poetry and rhetoric

my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold

or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire

and one day I will take my teenaged plug

and connect it to the nearest socket

raping an 85 year old white woman

who is somebody’s mother

and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed

a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time

“Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.”