CURRENT AFRICAN AMERICAN CENTER EXHIBIT

Coloring Outside the Lines:

Black Cartoonists as Social Commentators

 

Comic strips offer a unique form of social criticism and commentary. The best cartoons expose some truths and, to quote the Bible, “the truth will set you free.” Cartoonists must often be provocateurs. As cartoonist Keith Knight says, “Cartoonists are the court jesters of modern times. We can get away with things that others can’t because of our ‘cute’ drawings.” Coloring Outside the Lines features some of those “court jesters.” They share their experiences, inspiration and perspectives as social commentators and provocateurs.

The exhibit features several Black cartoonists whose comic strips appear in newspapers across the country.

Related Program: Artist Discussion - nationally-syndicated cartoonists Darrin Bell (Candorville and Rudy Park) and curator Kheven LaGrone discuss their art. Animated shorts by nationally-syndicated cartoonist Jerry Craft (Mama’s Boyz) will also be screened. The discussion will be moderated by Thomas Robert Simpson, founder and artistic director of AfroSolo. Sunday, June 13, Main Library, Lower Level, Koret Auditorium, 1 – 3 PM

Jewelle Gomez: National Poetry Month

Jewelle Gomez, author, poet, critic, and activist also has the honor of being the President of the San Francisco Public Library Commission.  Gomez is the author of seven books, including the Lambda Literary Award winning novel The Gilda Stories. This novel, which has been in print since 1991 and reframes the traditional vampire mythology, taking a lesbian feminist perspective, is an adventure about an escaped slave who comes of age over two hundred years.  Gomez has been the executive director of the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University, she was also the director of Cultural Equity Grants at the San Francisco Arts Commission and the director of the Literature Program for the New York State Council on the Arts.  I am honored to highlight the work of such a fine artist and friend of libraries. 

Flamingoes and Bears

Flamingos and bears
meet secretly
on odd street corners.
Horses and chickens
elephants and geese
looked shocked and appalled.

Ostriches dont look at all.

Bear and flamingo
ignore greedy gazes
from disgruntled parents
and frightened sly weasels
who hiss
as the couple
strolls by.

Chance brought them here
from forest and sea,
but science won't agree
where
bears and flamingoes
learned how simple
building a nest
in a den can be.

Now flamingo and bear
sleep forever entwined
in all sorts of climes
be it rainy or snowy or sunny,
happy to know
there's room in this world
for a bear who likes palm trees

and a bird who loves honey.

from: Flamingoes & Bears : poems
Jewelle Gomez

POETRY MONTH: GUEST POET

James Cagney is a poet and writer residing in Oakland, Ca.

This is the full bio from a man who has poetry flowing through his veins like lava- when cut, he bleeds scorching synechdoche, smoking similes, smoldering and too hot to touch images that sear and brand the imagination lingering long after the page has been turned. 
He says about himself:
My imagination works like a snowball– the tiniest stone grows larger, collecting more weight as it continues on its journey. The road to this story diverged from two places.

Last month, my list serve shared a recent discovery of a black penguin. Being writers, many of us were alarmed at the language the media used to talk about this rarity. Even the link above uses the sinister word ‘mutant’ to describe her. The animal is provocatively beautiful and certainly draws my imagination. The problem is the word ‘black’ and how my mind lazily defaults towards easy archetypes and stereotypes in order to have the animal ’speak’. Could I write a poem for an animal without leaning on easy smiles and images and even straying away from feeling forced to speak about blackness at all? I’ve thought about her for a month without being able to write anything; googling again and again photos of an adult black penguin just to admire.

Around the same time, one of my coworkers and friends on Facebook posted a random status which said something like: Forget it! I’m going to chug everything and move to Antarctica and live amongst the penguins.

And I saw this and without thinking replied: don’t do it. If you do, get separate beds. They snore, their farts smell like fish, and their feet are cold as ice. And I implied having to forgo a relationship with a penguin over cold feet or however I’d said it.

Both of these ideas crashed together over breakfast this morning, at a time when I’d been reading the work of James Tate who specializes in writing these beautifully dreamy prose poems that somehow grow in the oddest directions sentence by sentence. He is my role model here as i imagine myself shoveling snow on the ‘lawn’ of an igloo. All I needed was an image, THAT crazy image, and I stared at it like a psychic with a bad antenna until it cleared up on the page.



                                               *****



My Ex-Lover or Fuck Somalia


She stood in the doorway of the igloo and said, This isn’t working. I was shaving
our ice lawn and saw she stood barefoot with her flippers crossed sternly.
You’ll catch your death, I said. Put on those slippers I bought you off Ebay.
And where’s your headscarf? Its hand dyed silk from Somalia.
Fuck Somalia, she said. I’m not African. I’m a penguin.
And I want to be alone and single again.
I didn’t know what to say. So I held up my ice shaver in Moses pose
and the mosh pit of penguins parted cleanly on the ice shelf.
This time she didn’t laugh, just pretended to smoke and look disinterested.
What about the children, I said. We don’t have children, she said.
I was shamed. I could never get a full erection around so much ice.
Are you going back to mother, I said.
She disowned me because of my mutation, she said. I’m staying
here and asking YOU to leave. National Geographic
is giving me my own reality show. I’m going to be famous
and invited to all the glamorous parties and movie stars
will kiss my ass and send me screenplays. And you’ll just be
the footnote in my ghostwritten biography.
Last night I had a dream, I said.
Is this another reference to Malcolm Luther King? she said.
No, this was a real dream. I said. I dreamed
I was Pablo Neruda and I wrote an ode for every Eskimo
word there is for snow. I made them all complicated
love poems where the first letter in each line spells your name vertically.
I wrote these poems in cayenne pepper on the snowbank
above our igloo. Every morning at sunrise the words are illuminated
with lemonly light and my poetry rises in the mist of the dawning
air, swirling and raining around us as we make love, our skin steaming
making our kisses hot as if our tongues were orange habaneros.
I’m going to need you to leave before the camera crews arrive,
she said. They’ll think I’m crazy for ever having loved you.

POETRY MONTH GUEST POET

In an attempt to introduce new poets from throughout the African Diaspora to the readers of this blog, I continue this months poetry theme with a young  writer.
Nana Nyarko Boateng, is a 23 year old Ghanaian poet:
"I do not always understand poetry, but I am at all times partial to look into her. I like that she takes my attention and help me to be true to my feelings. An underlining significance of my literary journey is the composition of (my) realities through imagination and craft; such that I feel a gratifying functionality (of soul and spirit) when I write. As it may not be about myself in my artistic expressions, it always is from myself. Poetry is my true address.


"Poetry is a clay pot. It works a balance on hot coal, tense waters, in soft rain, sun beams and spirit music. Whatever the poet will let, poetry will hold. The thoughts and feelings of a poet as captured in lines and stanzas becomes an entrance (or exit) in a manner that is unlimited. Beyond the rhythm and imagery that entrails our emotions, poetry (re)incarnates the human experience. The reader fetches what they will in any piece and wholly or in part walks on with herbs of words, fresh streams of metaphors that is able to stay like a pungent smell that won’t leave the hairs in your nostrils. Poetry lives with us, grows with us, transits with us and returns to us."


god in your person

dream of

peculiar flowers

like sound of laughter

fluid in words you could spell

only after lettering down

libation on territories virgin

with mystic bite of your footsteps

creating gardens

of hope beyond tales

POETRY MONTH: GUEST POET

As I mentioned in an earlier posting for National Poetry Month, I was going to post the poetry of new, up and coming poets.  Here is the first poet this month. 
In May, 2009 Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi finished her M.F.A in Creative Writing at American University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Afro-Hispanic Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Border Senses, Brush Mountain Review, Callaloo, Hispanic Cultural Review, PALABRA, Poet Lore, Revista LENGUA, and Saranac Review. Recently, her manuscript “The Flamboyan’s Red Petals,” was a finalist in the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award competition.

Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi (c) Alison V. Cartwright

When I approach a poem, I’m always returning to my mother tongues, to that voice in my head that emulates my sense of home. I grew up in an English speaking country, the United States, but in a Spanish speaking family where my father spoke the Spanish from Dominican Republic and my mother, the Spanish and Lunfardo from Argentina: A simple question such as, ‘How are you,’ contrasted my father’s, ‘Como estas tu,’ and my mother’s, ‘Que tal, che?’ Every country, and Latin American countries are no exception, has its own peculiarities, its own inflections and accents, sayings and vocabulary words – its inherent cultural flavors. How does one reconcile these when they come from two or more worlds? How does one come to balance these differing identities that so often can be at odds with one another? Poetry is the place where I dissect these issues, and try to show not only how different languages, cultures, religions, races or ethnic groups are unified, but how they co-exist within me and in the countries I am from.




Learning to Speak Spanglish


I missed the S not in Spanish
but Español. Somewhere

between my tongue and throat -
not a miss you,

but something missing
in the words I spoke.

My friend Jesús tells me
to return home, to speak soft-like,

like even when it’s bad
it still sounds sweet.

So I roll my Rs, practice
my prepositions.

It isn’t para, but por.
Tell myself not mas mejor,

but simply better,
to repeat my mother’s,

sank-you, sank-you,
hold not my father’s, hermano,

but his, Oye brother,
beautiful day, no? And my mouth is:

A collision of two alphabets
without teeth.
                    
                         Poem previously appeared in BorderSenses Summer 2008

JEAN TOOMER: National Poetry Month

One of my all time favorite writers has been Jean Toomer.  His melding of poetry and fiction in his most famous novel Cane, will always be a classic work that lingers with me.  He idealizes the black south of the early 20th Century, but he does so in a way that neither glorifies and or falsely praises thus becoming maudlin, or trivializes and belittles.  Cane is a series of vignettes, interspersed with poems,  that speak to the soul of the characters within.  Although considered a Harlem Renaissance writer, there never seems for Toomer to be a strong connection with his fellow Black writers of the time, and thus for the most part, seems to me to be a Renaissance writer by circumstance alone.
Born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Washington, D.C., Jean was of mixed racial descent and spent his childhood attending both all-white and all-black segregated schools. In his early years Toomer resisted racial classifications and wished to be identified only as an American. Toomer attended several colleges for short stints but did not take a degree. The readings that he would undertake and the lectures he attended during his college years shaped the direction his writing would take. After leaving college, Toomer published some short stories, devoted several months to the study of Eastern philosophies and took a job as a principal in Sparta, Georgia. The segregation Toomer experienced in the South lead Toomer to identify more strongly as an African-American. In 1923, Toomer published the experimental novel Cane, his most famous work. A series of poems and short stories about the Black experience in America, Cane was hailed by critics and is seen as an important work of both the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation. In 1926 Toomer went to France to attend the Gurdjieff Institute and was associated with G. I. Gurdjieff until 1935. Toomer was prolific during this period, writing plays, the novel The Gallonwerps and several poems and short stories that appeared in The Dial.


Georgia Dusk  by Jean Toomer
 

The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue
The setting sun, too indolent to hold
A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,
Passively darkens for night's barbecue,

A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,
An orgy for some genius of the South
With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,
Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.
The sawmill blows its whistle, buzz-saws stop,
And silence breaks the bud of knoll and hill,
Soft settling pollen where plowed lands fulfill
Their early promise of a bumper crop.

Smoke from the pyramidal sawdust pile
Curls up, blue ghosts of trees, tarrying low
Where only chips and stumps are left to show
The solid proof of former domicile.
Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,
Race memories of king and caravan,
High-priests, an ostrich, and a juju-man,
Go singing through the footpaths of the swamp.

Their voices rise . . the pine trees are guitars,
Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain . .
Their voices rise . . the chorus of the cane
Is caroling a vesper to the stars . .

O singers, resinous and soft your songs
Above the sarcred whisper of the pines,
Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines,
Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs.

Reapers by Jean Toomer


Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that's done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.

BOOKS ON OR BY JEAN TOOMER:

The lives of Jean Toomer : a hunger for wholeness
Jean Toomer, artist : a study of his literary life and work, 1894-1936
The Negro novel in America
Cane.
The collected poems of Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer reader : selected unpublished writings

APRIL AND WORDS ARE BLOOMING ALL AROUND

April is National Poetry Month, so I could find no better time to highlight African American poetry and poetics.


In an attempt to answer, if ever so briefly, the question of the possible origins of African/African American poetry, I started looking first beyond American shores and back to Africa and to the oral tradition of storytelling.

I looked at the long history of storytelling by griots in Africa. A griot, according Wikipedia, is a West African poet, praise singer, and wandering musician, considered a repository of oral tradition. In the European tradition griots would be considered bards. Not only are griots traveling poets but they were also the depository and disseminators of tribal and cultural history. Such epic works as Sundiata An Epic of Old Mali, was initially told in oral form and tells the history of the nation of Mali.

The poetic style of African storytelling has continued and can be seen in the work Song Of Ocol by Okot p’Bitek. This long poem, at times read as a piece of work that hails from an oratory beginning. It has been said that poetry is a literary form best heard and not read, this seems to be the stance that many African Americans poets historically have taken.

To find a starting point for the poetry of African Americans, I will start with the two of the earliest published black poets- Jupiter Hammon and Phyllis Whitney. Both poets were steeped in the tradition of classical European literary form. Moving forward to the Harlem Renaissance the poetry of African Americans became the poetry of identity politics. This was poetry written through a black aesthetics both bad and good. Arguments went back and forth on if black poetics should reflect the good within society so as not to show up flaws, or be directly linked to the real world as lived by all African Americans- both the gritty and urban and the upper class, educated lifestyles.

Poetry heavily steeped in a black collective consciousness continued up through the 1960’s with the Black Arts Movement which was the artistic arm of the black power and pro black ideological movements of the time and centered literature squarely in a pro-black, sometimes militant vein. Such views of African American literature has continued through the 1970’s, but more recently more and more poets can be seen to be writing in traditional forms such as sonnets, using meter- spondee and trochee, classic patterns that define poetry and not writing about themes that are universal and color-blind reflecting the experiences of every man. This can be seen as throwback to the writing of Hammon and Whitley, although thematically they are still worlds apart. Also with the onset of slam and spoken word poetry, African American writers are re-linking their art, unknowingly so, back to the oral tradition of poetry.

Throughout April I will be posting poems from some established, well known poets both dead and alive, as well poems from up and coming poets from America and around the world.

photos: Poets Camille Dungy, Langston Hughes.