Today, though I stumble, as usual, I am “thinking through” my language–considering my word choices in a draft of a poem, in comments on student work, in conversations with other attendees on the steps of Shriver Hall on Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood Campus, site of the inaugural “JHU Forum on Race in America,” featuring Ta-Nehisi Coates. The event was planned for the evening of Tuesday the 28th, but was re-scheduled for this morning after the university canceled classes and events on Tuesday in the wake of this week’s–
as usual, I am “thinking through” language, and I am thinking through language, and language is thinking through me–
unrest slash protest slash riots slash #BaltimoreUprising. In the wake of the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. In the wake of a country built on systemic injustices. I am thinking of words as seeds of perspective, sown (we hope) to hold their ground and grow into narratives of truth and justice, though we know that too often (to overextend a figure), some crops of words are subsidized, some crops of words are GMOs, engineered, media-modified–
slash riots:
“Eyewitnesses: The Baltimore Riots Didn’t Start the Way You Think”
“How drunk sports fans helped spark Saturday night’s post-protest violence”
slash thugs:
“Baltimore Mayor Treads Fine Line in Divided City”
On the steps of Shriver Hall, I reintroduce myself to a woman I met at a community meeting organized by The Intersection‘s student leaders on Tuesday. “I grew up in Baltimore thinking inequality was ‘normal,'” she says. “How do we get people to stop thinking that?”
Headlines now, locally and around the country (italics mine): “Tension lingers as Baltimore tries to get back to normal.” “Baltimore slowly coming back to normal despite new protests.” “Life getting back to normal after riots.” “Baltimore Getting Back To Normal Amid Huge Police Presence.” “Baltimore moves back toward normal.”
Orioles manager Buck Showalter: “There are some things I don’t want to be normal [in Baltimore again].”
In the words of Dr. N. D. B. Connolly, who moderated the event with Dr. Debra Furr-Holden, Coates “grew up three miles from here [in Baltimore]; some might say a world away from here.” In the hometown audience were family members that included his father and nephews… and his 3rd & 4th grade Gifted & Talented teacher. Connolly quoted Walter Mosley describing Coates as “the young James Joyce of the hip hop generation.” He went on to say, “Many of us give him a higher accolade: the James Baldwin of our generation.” These kinds of accolades-by-comparison are absolutely appropriate to introduction-as-genre, but my mind hadn’t yet settled into the forum, and I couldn’t help focusing on (or losing focus through) the construction of “[name] as the [other name] of [situation]“; I couldn’t help but think of something else I had just read by Damon Young with the headline “Baltimore is Not Ferguson; Freddie Gray is Not Michael Brown”:
http://verysmartbrothas.com/baltimore-is-not-ferguson-freddie-gray-is-not-michael-brown/
I tried to hold systemic injustice, policies of inequality, and structural white supremacy in mind, alongside a lineage of thinkers and writers that includes Coates, alongside the specificity of voice, perspective, and life experiences of… well… everyone. Coates remarked on our cultural focus on individuals like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. who actually see a change in their lifetime (for Douglass, the end of Slavery, for King, the end of Jim Crow laws). Coates reminded the audience, “We are talking about centuries-long struggle,” reminded us not to forget all of the individuals, all the people who struggled and committed acts of resistance and didn’t see the end of anything, but still struggled; Ida B. Wells continued her lifelong anti-lynching efforts until shortly before she died in 1931, never seeing “the end of anything.” I thought again of James Baldwin: “History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.” As I thought about Baldwin, Coates quoted Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Silencing the Past: Power and Production of History: “We are never as embedded in history as when we pretend not to be.” Watch the rest of the forum here:
http://hub.jhu.edu/2015/04/30/ta-nehisi-coates-race-forum
In the United States of America, today is also the 40th “anniversary” (another iffy word choice) of the fall of Saigon slash the end of the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, today is Reunification Day. Today is also National Poem in Your Pocket Day. Here are some poems, from my pocket to yours.
Thinking of how we use language, what we fight for, and how we protest, I’d like to share George Starbuck’s poem “Of Late,” first published in Poetry in 1966:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/19639
Thinking of Vietnam, I’d like to share “Facing It,” by Yusef Komunyakaa:
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/facing-it
And thinking of everything Coates spoke of (link to the talk above), I’d like to share Audre Lorde’s “Power”:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/240144
And if you have very small pockets, but want to make the most of that space, consider a poem by Langston Hughes in each pocket:
Justice
That justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.
*
History
The past has been a mint
Of blood and sorrow.
That must not be
true of tomorrow.