Michael Janairo

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  • Black History Month: June Jordan

    junejordan.jpg

    Here’s a poem from the poet, essayist, author and educator June Jordan, who lived from 1936 to 2002 and was influential in the Black Arts movement and beyond. The poem is taken from the Web site Chicken Bones: A Journal for Literary & Artistic African-American themes:

    I Must Become A Menace to My Enemies

    Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto, President of

    The People’s Republic of Angola: 1976

    I will no longer lightly walk behind

    a one of you who fear me:

    Be afraid.

    I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits and facial tics

    I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore

    and this is dedicated in particular

    to those who hear my footsteps

    or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery

    cart

    then turn around

    see me

    and hurry on

    away from this impressive terror I must be:

    I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon

    surrounded by my comrades singing

    terrible revenge in merciless

    accelerating

    rhythms

    But

    I have watched a blind man studying his face.

    I have set the table in the evening and sat down

    to eat the news.

    Regularly

    I have gone to sleep.

    There is no one to forgive me.

    The dead do not give a damn.

    I live like a lover

    who drops her dime into the phone

    just as the subway shakes into the station

    wasting her message

    cancelling the question of her call:

    fulminating or forgetful but late

    and always after the fact that could save or

    condemn me

    I must become the action of my fate.

    II

    How many of my brothers and my sisters

    will they kill

    before I teach myself

    retaliation?

    Shall we pick a number?

    South Africa for instance:

    do we agree that more than ten thousand

    in less than a year but that less than

    five thousand slaughtered in more than six

    months will

    WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

    I must become a menace to my enemies.

    III

    And if I

    if I ever let you slide

    who should be extirpated from my universe

    who should be cauterized from earth

    completely

    (lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the

    terrorist degree)

    then let my body fail my soul

    in its bedevilled lecheries

    And if I

    if I ever let love go

    because the hatred and the whisperings

    become a phantom dictate I o-

    bey in lieu of impulse and realities

    (the blossoming flamingos of my

    wild mimosa trees)

    then let love freeze me

    out.

    I must become

    I must become a menace to my enemies.

    Source: Trouble the Water (325-327)

    Click here to hear her read the poem: A Poem about Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters, from 1992.

    Her official Web site is here.

    Here is a biography from the Voices from the Gap Web site.

    From an obituary in the Guardian:

    June Jordan, who has died aged 65, after suffering from breast cancer for several years, defied all pigeonholes. Poet, essayist, journalist, dramatist, academic, cultural and political activist – she was all these things, by turn and simultaneously, but above all, she was an inspirational teacher, through words and actions, and a supremely principled person.

    Among African-American writers, she was undoubtedly one of the most widely published, the author of well over two dozen books of non-fiction, poetry, fiction, drama and children’s writing. She emerged onto the political and literary scene in the late 1960s, when the movements demanding attention were for civil rights and women’s liberation, and anti-war.

    Article continues
    She engaged with all of these and more, for her battles were for freedom, whether that involved planning a new architecture for Harlem with her mentor Buckminster Fuller, or speaking out on the Palestinian cause. She spoke out against, or did something about, oppression wherever it was to be found.

    It was as a political essayist that Jordan stood head and shoulders above most of her contemporaries. Her collection Civil Wars (1981) was the first such work to be published by a black woman, dealing with battles both external and internal. In subsequent volumes, including On Call (1985) and Technical Difficulties (1992), she wrote about South Africa, Nicaragua and Lebanon, as well as myriad aspects of race and class in the US. She championed the use of black English in the education system 30 years before the emergence of the debate about “Ebonics” (a term she hated).

    The previous authors and writings featured on this blog for Black History Month:
    “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”
    Gwendolyn Brooks
    August Wilson
    “Our Nig” by Harriet Wilson
    “Twelve Years A Slave” by Solomon Northup
    “The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois
    Langston Hughes
    “Cane” by Jean Toomer
    “The Great Negro Plot” by Mat Johnson
    “Passing” by Nella Larsen
    “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
    “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
    “I Have a Dream” speech”
    “Sula” by Toni Morrison
    “The Known World” by Edward P. Jones
    “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
    “The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead
    “Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington
    “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison
    Sonia Sanchez
    “Black Girl in the Ring” by Nola Hopkinson

  • Book cover flap flap

    Media Bistro reports on authors upset with their publishers’ designs for book covers.

    Friday’s item on the novelist who rejected his book cover drew a response from another beleaguered St. Martin’s author, historical maritime mystery writer Joan Druett. On her website, she’s launching a light-hearted contest to see who can identify the greatest number of technical errors in the painting that’ll appear on the dust jacket of her next novel, Deadly Shoals, which we’ve reproduced below. (She includes relevant passages from the manuscript to give readers a hint about what to look for.)

    Here’s the link to Joan Druett’s Web site.

  • Audiobook review: “State of Denial”

    “State of Denial” by Bob Woodward. Read by Boyd Gaines. Abridged, 7 hours, 6 CDs. Simon & Schuster. $29.95.

    This book is difficult to take. I loaded it onto my iPod and listened to it at the gym while TV screens showed captions on CNN and Fox announcing new Iraqi and American casualties in Iraq.

    Among the many outrages recounted in the book — advisers too timid to give President Bush bad news, distortions and manipulations by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (especially in terms of troop requirements), Bush and Karl Rove exchanging fart jokes — what stands out most is Bush’s insistence on body counts of enemy dead as a gauge of progress.

    Woodward points out the fallacy of body counts with the example of the Vietnam War, which left more than 1 million Vietnamese and 58,193 Americans dead — and the U.S. still lost.

    Woodward does the United States a great service with this hard and necessary look at the inner workings of the Bush administration.

    Gaines does a good job in reading the book by giving a straightforward performance to highlight Woodward’s words and quotations, without resorting to impersonations.

  • 2007 Tournament of Books

    Head-to-head action of big-titles in search of the best. Cast your votes today. Go here.

  • Eco’s ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’

    In March, Umberto Eco’s novel is being reissued. It’s been years since I’ve read it, but it was a fun and complex story. I always liked to think of it as the kind of twisty, conspiracy-laden novel that could best be summed up as “The Da Vinci Code” for people who actually liked to read.

    Here’s the Library Journal review:

    Student of philology in 1970s Milan, Casaubon is completing a thesis on the Templars, a monastic knighthood disbanded in the 1300s for questionable practices. At Pilades Bar, he meets up with Jacopo Belbo, an editor of obscure texts at Garamond Press. Together with Belbo’s colleague Diotallevi, they scrutinize the fantastic theories of a prospective author, Colonel Ardenti, who claims that for seven centuries the Templars have been carrying out a complex scheme of revenge. When Ardenti disappears mysteriously, the three begin using their detailed knowledge of the occult sciences to construct a Plan for the Templars[…] In his compulsively readable new novel, Eco plays with “the notion that everything might be mysteriously related to everything else,” suggesting that we ourselves create the connections that make up reality. As in his best-selling The Name of the Rose, he relies on abstruse reasoning without losing the reader, for he knows how to use “the polyphony of ideas” as much for effect as for content. Indeed, with its investigation of the ever-popular occult, this highly entertaining novel should be every bit as successful as its predecessor.

    And in case you’ve no clue what the pendulum is, here’s a YouTube video of it taken at the Musée des arts et métiers (Paris):

  • Black History Month: “Brown Girl in the Ring”

    browngirl.jpg
    Nalo Hopkinson’s “Brown Girl in the Ring” was first published in 1998. Here’s a summary of the story written by Eleanor at Flights of Fantasy bookstore in Loudonville:

    Brown Girl in the Ring was Nalo Hopkinson’s first novel, and still my favourite. It’s set in a future Canada where the cities have decayed into chaos, and only the granddaughter of a voudou priestess can save her family and maybe the entire city. Hopkinson’s latest novel, The New Moon’s Arms, is just about to come out.

    Hopkinson defines herself as a writer of speculative fiction, saying:

    I’ve lived in Toronto, Canada since 1977, but spent most of my first 16 years in the Caribbean, where I was born. My writing reflects my hybrid reality.

    I write speculative fiction. For anyone who doesn’t know the term, it’s fiction in which impossible things happen. It includes magic realism, fantasy, science fiction and horror.

    Of note is an essay on Hopkinson’s Web site that responds to the question: “Why don’t people of color write speculative fiction?” (see the connection being made to “The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois“>W.E.B. DuBois by the use of the term “double-consciousness”)

    We do, but it’s unlikely that you’ll find it on the sf shelves in your bookstores. Novels such as Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day or Devorah Major’s An Open Weave end up on the shelves for black authors, not in the sf section.

    Although magic realist writing contains fantastical elements, many do not think of it when they think of speculative fiction, and it’s easier to find magic realism by authors of colour than it is to find “hard” science fiction or genre fantasy. For ideas on why that may be so, read Uppinder Mehan’s essay “The Domestication of Technology in Indian Science Fiction Short Stories” in Foundation, Fall 1998.

    Mehan’s essay is specifically about science fiction by writers from India, but a lot of what he says is applicable generally to sf by authors of colour, or authors from non-Western cultures. For instance:

    “A significant factor is the lack of cultural intimacy between reader and writer. The reader of sf from another culture has to thoroughly understand the culture of the story because he/she now has to understand not only the culture but also the sometimes subtle deformations introduced into the culture through extrapolation.”

    I run into that problem myself. My history and background combine Canadian, Trinidadian, Jamaican and Guyanese cultures. “Culture” is no one monolithic thing for me, and I draw on that varied heritage when I write. But if I introduce a “soucouyant” into a story, perhaps only readers from the Eastern Caribbean will know what that is. If instead I say “succubus,” I’d lose some readers’ comprehension and gain others’; and if I write “vampire,” chances are that pretty much everyone would have some idea of the kind of creature I mean. Through the weight of books and films generated by the sf industry, vampires have a greater intercultural penetration than either soucouyants or succubi. (Yes, I am smiling as I write this.) But because I want to write about a soucouyant, which is neither a succubus nor a vampire, but has characteristics common to both, I have to spend time describing the being, its appearance, its habits, the mythology that spawned it. I risk boring a small segment of informed readers who are–hopefully–impatient to have me get on with the story. Or I can leave out the explanation and frustrate a larger group of readers who haven’t a clue what I’m talking about.

    If I make my soucouyant male, or an infant, only informed readers will know how that departs from the myth. They will understand that I’m generating an extrapolation that is one more remove from the existing lore. But to everyone else, a baby soucouyant is just as remarkable as a grown one. They won’t know that I’ve just made the impossible even more so.

    It’s a series of choices I have to make every time I write, weighing speculation against information. So I know what Mehan means when he speaks about Indian sf writers battling

    “the difficulty of living with a double consciousness and, conversely, the impossibility of living without hybridity.”

    Thanks to Eleanor at Flights of Fantasy for suggesting this book.

    The previous authors and writings featured on this blog for Black History Month:
    “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”
    Gwendolyn Brooks
    August Wilson
    “Our Nig” by Harriet Wilson
    “Twelve Years A Slave” by Solomon Northup
    “The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois
    Langston Hughes
    “Cane” by Jean Toomer
    “The Great Negro Plot” by Mat Johnson
    “Passing” by Nella Larsen
    “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
    “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
    “I Have a Dream” speech”
    “Sula” by Toni Morrison
    “The Known World” by Edward P. Jones
    “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
    “The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead
    “Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington
    “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison
    Sonia Sanchez

  • Happy Birthday, WH Auden

    auden.jpg
    The poet was born 100 years ago today.

    An article from The Independent:

    As he wrote of Edward Lear, Auden himself “became a land”, his personal geography packed with must-visit sites. Poster-boy for the 1930s poetic revolution, standard-bearer of the anti-Fascist cultural left, keen-eyed reporter on Midlands foundries or Icelandic glaciers or Chinese wars, martini-sipping New York sophisticate, Christian mystic and seeker, semi-reluctant gay icon and camp gossip, mandarin expatriate in Austria and Italy, apostle of friendship and domesticity: Auden wore many social masks, all authentic, over his 66 productive years. But his mindscape was, over the decades, fissured by tension between the temptations of the public realm and the fulfilments of the private life.

    “Poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/ In the valley of its making,” he so quotably asserted in his 1939 elegy for WB Yeats. In truth, Auden had to argue himself out of a youthful conviction that art could indeed act as “a midwife to society”. Most reputable critics concur that he had done so, in New York, by the early 1940s and with works such as New Year Letter – and never looked back. I’m not so sure. Even at his most quietist, the mature Auden sounds a suspiciously declamatory kind of private man.

    Here’s an article from the Guardian.

    Here’s the Auden Society site with lists of events around the world.

    Here Auden read “On the Circuit.”

    Download the Paris Review interview (PDF).

  • Audiobook review: “Sherlock’s Legacy”

    “Sherlock’s Legacy” by Ed. Lange. With a full cast and narrator; music by Will Severin. Unabridged, 1.75 hours, 2 CDs. New York State Theatre Institute Family Classic AudioBooks. $16.95.

    The legendary detective is in his retirement and regrets never having married or having fathered a child. But then a young woman arrives, and mysteries soon abound — including a murder.

    Though the play begins slowly, the pace soon quickens — perhaps a little too quickly to be plausible. But the fun of the play is spending time with classic characters of Holmes and Watson in this richly imagined production.

    The full cast does a wonderful job of conveying the setting of England in 1920; however, the audio quality is uneven. Some performers’ voices are crisp, while others sound as if they are speaking in a hollow box.

    Nonetheless, the detailed study guide holds true to the institute’s pedagogical mission.

  • A poet speaks

    On his blog, Dan Wilcox gives a report of a poetry reading he gave on Feb. 17 with Mary Panza at the Behind the Egg reading series.

    With all the good-will energy of Dan Nester & Erik Sweet putting this series together why aren’t more poets there? Where are the poets who have already read in this series? Where are the poets who have been invited to read in the upcoming weeks (I know Joe was in Florida)? “Where Were the Professors?” is not just about the Professors anymore.

    The next event will feature R.M.Englehardt, Poet Essence, and Joseph Krausman on Saturday, March 17, at Point 5: 383.5 Madison Avenue, Albany, NY.