You Never Miss Your Water...

I went to the Hollywood Bowl in August with Otim, Yusef and family to see Barrington Levy, Beres Hammond and UB40. Of course Beres turned it out with "Who say a big man don't cry? You never miss your water 'til your well run dry." And me and my extended fam were up on our feet jammin' to the cool reggae sounds of none other than the man himself. Otim couldn't figure out why Beres didn't get top billing, but there are some mysteries like Britain's unemployment form that UB40 took it's name from that will never be resolved. It was the first and only concert I attended this summer. I was supposed to see Seun Kuti (one of Fela Kuti's musically gifted sons) but was handling business on the east coast. Now it's back to the grind since the semester started this week. Yusef called last night before teaching his creative writing class at SMC (Santa Monica College) just to check in cuz he hadn't heard from me in a week. I told him I was busy on my grind...thinking, prepping and preparing for the opening week. Critical Race theory and the African Diaspora with a focus on culture and identity politics seems to be the appropriate flavor--what with Michelle and Barack Obama positioned for the upcoming presidency. I had students study Michelle's opening speech and Barack's acceptance. A truly historic moment (Can you feel it? huh, huh, huh?) Most people could and even though I was teaching I had a sense that something was in the air. Regardless of what set you claimin' (Republican, Democrat, Independent) like the Chambers Brothers sang " Time has come today." Or the Ojay's "People get ready, there's a change a comin'...." Both songs inspired folk to rise to the occasion and dare to have "The Audacity of Hope" as Barack proffers. Today I received an email from Michelle speaking about what she saw when he accepted the nomination. She said, "The first time I ever heard Barack speak was at a community meeting on the South Side of Chicago. He won me over with the same message that inspired millions last night. He told people who'd been knocked down that , despite everything, we need to set our sights on a better place around the bend--and that it's up to each one of us to fight for it."  I was moved by both speeches which conicidentally were made on the same day the Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech on the mall in front of the Lincoln memorial in Washington, D. C. I watched Michelle and Barack speeches after my last class and after hopping on the 5 and heading north to Los Angeles. I was filled with anticipation because I had missed calls from friends who watched it as it was broadcast on CNN. One of the things that makes me get up in the morning and continue to teach despite Swartzenegger's budget cuts to education is when I walk into class and see the faces in the crowd, some familiar and some that I have yet to know...all hungry for knowledge, all eager for the promise of education and what that might mean to them and their family's future. I'm not naive enough to think Barack is the panacea or the super hero that will save us from government mismanagement and the fear and paranoia that's been bred over the last eight years in this country and around the world. But I do believe what he says about a quality education...that everyone deserves one, and that everyone must be able to go to college and become a participant in the long awaited change that only we as a unison, non-partisan society can bring about. We have much work to do and with Barack at the controls, the faith in leadership of this country may very well be restored. It's gangster...and I want to thank him for stepping up to the plate and thinking outside 'the box' with cats like , Cesaire, Chisolm, DuBois, Diop, Einstein, Ghandi, Lumumba, Mandela, Mother Teresa, Nkrumah and Ida B. Wells. Classes were full at City (some were overloaded) and I tried to stay within my cap, but refused to turn students away. I look forward to studying the events of the November election this semester. We are truly living in a historic moment that will ripple throughout time for decades to come.

If You're Black...

"Get Back...Get Back...Get Back to where you once belong," sang the Beatles in  '69. For me those lyrics conjure up Sly & the Family Stone's way back in the day utterance that most young folk (unless your like Gracie and studying the deep roots of Hip Hop) have no idea what the lyrics, "Don't call me nigga, whitey," and the call's remix , "Don't call me whitey, nigga" mean. A '69 verbal standoff of racial epitaphs during a time of political and social upchuck in a' merica and, by extension, the world. Music was major and moved minds and derrieres from L.A. to Nigeria to act-- to change individual, community, environmental or politics du jure.  

  Why in the world are y'all black folks so angry? Still? Or to quote the Incredible Hulk before he transmutes into the chartreuse creature who unleashes unbridled anger to the brink of raging fury, "Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."  But the Hulk, although green, represents whiteness, and if you're white and male (or in Hillary's case female) it's alright--even healthy to express your anger. But for young black men such as my grandson, Shaequawn Nagee, and for the generations of young black men and women that came before him, who were forced to bite their tongues and supress their emotions until the birth of Hip Hop, it's time to speak.

 After the dust settles from the recent presidential nomination of Barack Obama (can you believe it?), take a moment and study history (in the case of black folks), the history of the African Diaspora. Inherent in the literature, lyrics and music--you'll hear and perhaps begin to understand the deep well containing our emotional conundrum or divided soul that WEB Dubois speaks of describing our love/hate relationship with a'merica. Within the deep cool of our wellness a kaleidoscope of faces, (riffing off Derek Bell) exists. Our emotions including anger, love, forgiveness, and humor help us, not only survive in the  diaspora, but, moreover, to transcend it. We play the dozens aka snaps--or verbal sparring, which is our cultural inheritance from Africa, using it in order to contain our anger in the face of American and European terrorism in the form of colonization, Jim Crow laws, debt peonage, racial apartheid, neo-colonialism, rape and lynching for crimes such as "bumping into a white man's horse" or "standing in the way of a cool breeze." But to get to that level of consciousness is to get to the blackness of our human nature. And who wants to do that? It's easier to continue to stereotype us as angry black brutes or hyper-sexed hoes. For whites to fight against their invisible privilege it helps to think of this visual metaphor--walking against a forward moving airport tram. The media pundits, who swerve all over the rainbow forewarn us, including future president Obama to chill...on the anger tip. Better to stay yellow-mellow, like Tiger Woods, who vacillates between his Afro-Asian identity, even when Golf magazine features a noose on the front cover in an article about the golfer after it was suggested by a journalist that the only way for less gifted players to best him was to beat him up in a back alley and lynch Woods. Say What?  White America swore it was just kidding...and that blacks are simply too sensitive. It's important to remember that slave masters once rubbed salt in open wounds after applying up to 200 lashes to black backsides. Some died. Some healed and continued to repress their anger.

I must direct you to read Audre Lorde's (former poet laureate of NY) "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" (published in 1984). Lorde interrogates the notion of black anger, discussing its progressive use along with  a critique of inherited privileges bestowed by a racialized culture upon white women (particularly in the university arena) and white folks in general. This information is necessary intellectual ammo and is also helpful before your emotional barometer accelerates past O.C.   

On the real yo...we're not nearly angry enough, seduced by crumbs like the so-called "economic stimulus check" I received in the mail yesterday (this is not reparations yo), which is one reason why we aren't raising our voices about soaring gas prices

reported by AAA today @ a nationwide average of $4.04 per gallon, while speculative oil companies such as Exxon made over 40 billion thus far in 2008. And the 5.5% unemployment rate--the highest in twenty years, and the continual deployment of young people in Bush's falsified war aka Iraq in order to establish an ongoing military presence in the middle east to keep oil prices inflated (it costs $2 a barrel to produce yet it's hovering at $134 a barrel on the NYSE) tricking our over-amped minds into red-orange-yellow alerts so we believe the current government is protecting us from terrorism.  

How you livin'? 

If you're white, you're right

If you're yellow, you're mellow

If you're brown, stick around

If you're black, get back

get back, 

get back to where you once belonged....

Fyah on the Mountain...

It's me standing in front of Haycock mountain in the field where I used to play. In the field where I'll build my house one day. I picked this spot intentionally so I could look east, give thanks to the ancestors and meditate on the mountain in the morning as I'm writing. Can't wait to get back home so I can camp out at the old house, just behind the hedgerow, watch deer, rabbits, turtles and geese gaggling by the stream that flows into Tohee, finally overflowing into Lake Nockamixon. Can't wait, because I feel like my head's going to explode and I just might hurt somebody. It's been a long semester yo. Carole and I stood in this same field in the pouring rain this past winter, gathering brush and multiple rose that Dave (our brother) cut on the weekend when he wasn't working his regular j.o.b. We're a crew, Chapman C. Johnson & Sons & Daughters...working together to maintain and continue the legacy left to us by our parents. And oh yes, we have our differences and certainly don't always agree or get along, like most normal families, but when it comes time to handle business...we simply do. Perhaps it's because we are stake holders and know what's at stake--our land, our freedom our future for future generations to come. 

Can't wait to see Gracie. She's taken to calling her Nan every day to plan her 13th birthday party, check on my sanity and make sure I come home soon so she can wrap her arms around me. . Don't know if I've accomplished anything this semester as far as teaching is concerned. Tuesday, for instance, I stood in the quad outside my office listening to a group of students argue about their group presentation. They wanted my advice and what I didn't tell them was that at this point in the semester I barely can focus, let alone have any words of wisdom to bestow. But I listened to them speaking about their group process, which was trying everyone's patience and last nerve. The argument escalated and became quite heated. At one point it seemed as though they were going to throw blows. They talked over, under and around each other, refusing to listen... to each other or to me. I had to remind them that although Europeans hate each other, they manage to squash their differences long enough to let's say...enslave and colonize Africa. And now we, the descendants of this madness, kill and maim each other--on the continent and the diaspora over petty differences, like colors and territory we don't even own or he said/she said sour grapes. Greed Breeds Evil Deeds. There's too much to live for, too much work to do. Conflicts can be resolved if we stop, look and listen. Read history in order to avoid repeating it is also useful.  It' just too easy to be the proverbial happy darky, sassy sapphire or xenophobic zip coon.  So please yo, stop the coonin' and recognize, "there's fyah on the mountain and nobody seems to be on the run." One day when the river overflows we'll wish we had....

 

Mama May Have...

Women farmers have been holding it down, making groceries as it were, since goddess knows when...Got tired of all that foraging and moving about from from place to place. These days most of us don't even know how food gets on the table and depend on supermarkets and huge warehouses to get our grub on. I come from a long line of women farmers and in summer 07 passed this knowledge on to the young girls in my family. Me, my grandaughter Imani, her friend Rachel and Niara my grandniece pictured here clearing brush as we reclaim some of our land that's been overgrown by Cedars and Multiple Rose. I wrote about our experience--a short story titled "Makin' Groceries" which will be published in the Hunger and Thirst anthology ( forthcoming 2008 City Works Press). The tale I wove is layered...stories within stories-The Ant and the Grasshopper rmxd which my daddy, Chapman Custine Johnson, used to tell us all the time when he had us out in the field pickin' rocks and preparing the ground before planting. It also contains an Anansi story, which is a remix of Anansi and Grandfather Thunder. The moral of the story (there's always a moral) is about the consequenses of greed. In the end Anansi is shamed and runs away. The old ones say that he's been seen where the bush ghosts hakilele on the famished road. I saw some of the harvest, but had to leave as it piqued and return to Cali and teaching. Carole took over distributing food...we had so much after giving it to family and friends in the surrounding area she took veggies to the food bank and her church in Philly. The harvest kept coming and coming until finally the first frost hit the pumpkins and peppers, tomatoes and zucchini. In the story "Nan" who is a
matriarchal character based on none other than yours truly tells the girls that zucchini are magical cuz when you pick em the next day there's a giant one hanging on the vine. Billie Holiday (Strange Fruit) sings, "Mama may have, Papa may have...but God Bless the Child Who has his own." True dat, 'specially in these days and times when we seem to have forgotten the lessons that help us survive in a world focused on greed and consumption rather than preparing for prosperity. There is enough for everyone... there is no need for war. We can tap the sun's energy, change our lifestyles, recycle--if only we remember the cycle of planting and the ensuing harvest that will surely come. Here's a pumpkin for Niara!

A Woman's Gotta Write...

Me and my sister Carole were cleaning stalls on this chilly January morning. It was so cold that she had to hammer the ice in the trough so the cows could drink. There is something about shoveling shit...for me its a glutinous metaphor, representing life in the Diaspora. Tonight after African American Art class, Selina walked me to my office and told me she was @%$*@%# disgusted--couldn't believe the foolishness of Fat Tuesday, not in the Mardi Gras sense but in the sense that black women voted for Hillary because she was a woman. What can I say about platforms--shoes or stages where we don masks for all the world to see? I have issues with a woman who doesn't know what's going on in her own backyard, trying to run a country, yet breaking down in public; or at least seemingly breaking down when its convenient and on various occasions to garner the symp vote. But symp rhymes with pimp and somehow I feel like we been played. I could be wrong, but I come from a long line of African female farmers, teachers, thinkers, doers who can't really afford to shed tears at the drop of a chignon. Like Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, when Dr. Norcom stalks her, Mrs. Norcom turns her head the other way or blames the victim-- young slave women whose children were fathered by her husband, the good doctor. At one point in the slave narrative, Jacob's writes that Mrs. Norcom sold some of the babies fathered by her husband because she wanted new furniture. How easily we forget the relationship between ourselves and white women who find it convenient to stand with Daughters of Africa only when it suits them. Mama uses to say, "It's terrible when it suits." And to quote Public Enemy, "Can't Trus' It" when it comes to old girls tears. 

My sister Carole, our family matriarch, has tremendous weight on her shoulders. When I'm back home I share the weight cleaning stalls,

 burning brush, chopping cedars, recycling, mowing grass, planting the garden during the day and writing at night, which she scolds me for like mama, who warned me about burning the candle at both ends. But a woman's gotta write what a woman's gotta write when a woman's gotta write it.  

Selina wrote a brilliant journal about double consciousness and masking,  which she read in class tonight. The question is... what lies behind the mask? Paul Laurence Dunbar referred to the double consciousness of African people in the Diaspora and the mask "...that grins and lies/that hides our cheeks and shades our eyes/ this debt we pay to human guile/with torn and bleeding hearts we smile/ and mouth with myriad subtlties/ we wear the mask"...still.  And Gwendolyn Brooks writes, I've stayed in the front yard all my life/ I want a peek at the back/Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows. A girl gets sick of a rose.  Take off your mask, pay attention to your own back yard...then holla back.