FEBRUARY IS AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH -- AUDRE LORDE

 

   Audre Lorde was an amazing poet, novelist, fighter for the oppressed and marginalized, women, lesbians, and more.  From the Poetry Foundation:   "A self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing the injustices of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Her poetry, and “indeed all of her writing,” according to contributor Joan Martin in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, “rings with passion, sincerity, perception, and depth of feeling.” Concerned with modern society’s tendency to categorize groups of people, Lorde fought the marginalization of such categories as “lesbian” and “black woman,” thereby empowering her readers to react to the prejudice in their own lives. While the widespread critical acclaim bestowed upon Lorde for dealing with lesbian topics made her a target of those opposed to her radical agenda, she continued, undaunted, to express her individuality, refusing to be silenced. As she told interviewer Charles H. Rowell in Callaloo: “My sexuality is part and parcel of who I am, and my poetry comes from the intersection of me and my worlds… [White, arch-conservative senator] Jesse Helms’s objection to my work is not about obscenity…or even about sex. It is about revolution and change.” Fighting a battle with cancer that she documented in her highly acclaimed Cancer Journals (1980), Lorde died of the illness in 1992."

   Audre Lord was also a public school librarian - which is wonderful!!  She was born February 18, 1934 to parents originally from Grenada in New York City.  "The youngest of three sisters, she was raised in Manhattan and attended Catholic school.  While she was still in high school, her first poem appeared in Seventeen magazine. Lorde received her BA from Hunter College and an MLS from Columbia University. She served as a librarian in New York public schools from 1961 through 1968. In 1962, Lorde married Edward Rollins. They had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathon, before divorcing in 1970."

    "Audre Lorde was professor of English at John Jay College of criminal justice and Hunter College. She was the poet laureate of New York from 1991-1992. She died of breast cancer in 1992. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde was published in 1997."
    "The third and youngest daughter of Linda Gertrude Belmar and Frederic Byron Lorde, Audre Geraldine was born tongue-tied and so nearsighted that she was considered legally blind. She grew up in Harlem during the Depression, hearing her mother's stories about the West Indies. She learned to talk while she learned to read, at the age of four. Her mother taught her to write during this time and Audre "did not like the tail of the Y hanging down below the line in Audrey" and so would omit it; she "love[d] the evenness of AUDRELORDE" (Zami, 1982). This early incident reveals the importance of naming and self-definition to Lorde, themes that she develops in her later writings."

   There is so much more to say about the beautiful Ms. Lorde but I think I'd rather quote her poetry.  But also that she wrote about her cancer experience (and unfortunately died of breast cancer).

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.” 

Audre Lorde

   "As a noted feminist, Lorde painstakingly struggled against the limitations of the label, insisting that feminism is important to all factions of African American life. As a perceived outsider on many fronts, Lorde believed that bringing together divergent groups can only strengthen and heal a torn society: "When I say I am a Black feminist, I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my Blackness as well as my womanness, and therefore my struggles on both these fronts are inseparable." These views are explored further in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), published by Crossing Press. This nonfiction collection explores the fear and hatred existing between African American men and women, feminists, or lesbians and the challenge between African American women and white women to find common ground. Another crucial area of emphasis presented in Sister Outsider is the isolation found among African American women and their subsequent rejection of each other’s trust, friendship, and gifts. (BK)"

   "Before she died, Lorde in an African naming ceremony took the name Gambda Adisa, meaning Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known. (AR)"

Poetry Foundation - http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/audre-lorde 
Academy of American Poets - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/audre-lorde 
Modern American Poetry - http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lorde/life.htm 
The Audre Lorde Project - http://alp.org/about/audre 
Speech at NYU - The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House - http://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Lorde_The_Masters_Tools.pdf 
Biography.com - http://www.biography.com/people/audre-lorde-214108 
Audre Lorde Quotes - http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/audre_lorde.html   
Audre Lorde Poems - http://www.poemhunter.com/audre-lorde-2/ 
 

FEBRUARY IS AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH - GIL SCOTT-HERON

   Gil Scott-Heron is perhaps the most well known figure on my list of lightly or unknown heroes of African American history.  If nothing else, people remember his song "THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED."   
   Often mentioned as the Father of Rap, Gil Scott-Heron is still not well enough known among the young who might be able to truly appreciate him.
   I heard an interview with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar the other day and in it he mentions having known Scott-Heron and actually playing drums with him a few times when he came to Los Angeles to play.  For several years I made it a point to look for his appearances -- always in the month of February.  I remember seeing him at the Wilshire Ebell, Marla Gibb's Marla's Memory Lane Jazz and Supper Club, and McCabes in Santa Monica. I always wondered why he varied his venues -- but then, he was always at least an hour late arriving. Perhaps each venue did not ask him to return?
   Gil Scott-Heron's ability to speak to the demons in our minds and souls was unsurpassed. I learned that his own demons would ultimately defeat him, in a final way.  He would go to jail his last few years only because of drug possession [OUR HORRIBLE DRUG LAWS - THE UNITED STATES IS INHUMANE AND DRACONIAN], and die at the very young age of 62.

   But before this, before the ravages of age and pain and guilt and destruction Gil Scott-Heron would achieve a body of work that left to us an incredible treasure of spoken word and music.   Just the titles alone conjure up images that won't easily leave one's consciousness.  Each song felt as if he was giving us a political tutorial, an inside view, a lesson in empathy.   WHITEY ON THE MOON, HOME IS WHERE THE HATRED IS, [“God, did you ever try to turn your sick soul inside out so that the world could watch you die?”]  SAVE THE CHILDREN,  WHO'LL PAY REPARATIONS ON MY SOUL, LADY DAY AND JOHN COLTRANE,  WINTER IN AMERICA, JOHANNESBURG, WE ALMOST LOST DETROIT, THREE MILES DOWN, SHUT EM DOWN, and ALIEN (HOLD ON TO YOUR DREAMS).
   From the L.A. Times:  "Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago on April 1, 1949. His mother, a librarian, and father, a professional soccer player from Jamaica, split up when he was 2, and he went to live with his grandmother in Jackson, Tenn.
    "There he had firsthand experience with racial issues: He was among a group of black children who integrated a local elementary school. He also began playing piano and encountered one of his major influences."
   "I was a big fan of Langston Hughes, who wrote a weekly column in a black newspaper," he said in a 1999 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. "My grandmother used to get it every Thursday, and we used to sit out on the front porch and read it."  
   "The Harlem poet and author triggered Scott-Heron's literary side, and after he moved to New York to live with his mother, his talent led him to the prestigious Fieldston School. He went on to Hughes' alma mater in Pennsylvania, Lincoln University, and in 1970 published a novel, "The Vulture," followed by a volume of poetry, "Small Talk at 125th and Lenox."

   From the NY Times:  "Mr. Scott-Heron often bristled at the suggestion that his work had prefigured rap. “I don’t know if I can take the blame for it,” he said in an interview last year with the music Web site The Daily Swarm. He preferred to call himself a “bluesologist,” drawing on the traditions of blues, jazz and Harlem renaissance poetics."  

"Yet, along with the work of the Last Poets, a group of black nationalist performance poets who emerged alongside him in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Scott-Heron established much of the attitude and the stylistic vocabulary that would characterize the socially conscious work of early rap groups like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions. And he has remained part of the DNA of hip-hop by being sampled by stars like Kanye West."

“You can go into Ginsberg and the Beat poets and Dylan, but Gil Scott-Heron is the manifestation of the modern word,” Chuck D, the leader of Public Enemy, told The New Yorker in 2010. “He and the Last Poets set the stage for everyone else.”

The last epitaph for G. Scott-Heron - http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/25/the-last-holiday-gil-scott-heron-review
Who Is Gil Scott-Heron? a movie - http://gilscottheron.net
Biography, streaming albums - http://www.allmusic.com/artist/gil-scott-heron-mn0000658346
Discography at Discogs -- http://www.discogs.com/artist/16533-Gil-Scott-Heron  
Obituary in New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/arts/music/gil-scott-heron-voice-of-black-culture-dies-at-62.html?login=email&_r=0  
Rolling Stone obituary - http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/gil-scott-heron-forefather-of-hip-hop-dead-at-62-20110528 
Los Angeles Times obituary - http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/29/local/la-me-gil-scott-heron-20110529 
Dave Zirin Interview with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - http://www.thenation.com/article/kareem-abdul-jabbars-beautiful-mind/