Friday, July 27, 2007

Let's Talk Film: Talk to Me

I've wanted to write something about this film the moment I first saw it( about four days ago.) At first, I thought I'd write a funky neat little review, witty, kind of like the ones you'd see in the City Paper. But, then I thought why? Why not just write something plain-spoken without the posturing of a critic. So here's what I thought about Talk to Me.

Talk to Me gets several cool points from me. This was that rare gem from the black cinema god (Apollo) who sends us a little something nice every year. Notice the rich dramatization of the time and place of this film. The music the imagined whiff of afro sheen, the bell bottoms, the polite sounds of the Supremes juxtaposed to James Brown. I'm always fascinated by works that treat history in unsentimental ways. I actually could feel the heaviness of the air, the shattered windows, the upturned cars in the city when Dr. Martin Luther King was assasinated.

And what about the realness of the film. I like how the writers/director didn't succumb to drawing a line in the sand where the bourgeois black character lives and where the felon/hustler/street brother existed. There's was an interesting walk on a tight rope where each character had something to impart on the other. They did not live in a vacuum as many folks would have us believe. There was a community that existed in the world of that film.

The characters weren't stock in the least. They were flawed, noble, vulnerable, and powerful in their own ways. Its examination of the ways in which the black community depend one another was right on. And, it also presented a different life of a former offender. When do we see a film that does not glorify the prison life? Although there were several hustler tactics that the protagonist play by Don Cheadle utilized. This film also brought to bear the attitudes that many middle class blacks have towards their kin who may have a history with the penal system.

On the whole, I thought this film was a sterling example of what black writers, directors, and actors should be doing with their talents. This is a work of art--both hands down.

Did anyone else see this film? What did you think?

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Employment Opportunity

Do you know anyone who needs a job?

I'm managing a Karibu Bookstore (metro accessible) in Pentagon City Mall and am looking for sales associates to start ASAP. Have them fax me their resumes at 703-415-4644 or email them to pcmanager@karibubooks.com

DC African American Writers Guild

We have wonderful news!

The Washington DC African-American Writer’s Guild (AAWG) is in the process of reemerging as the home base for African American writers working to realize their creative projects. As you know, the DC/Metro area is populated with a number of talented writers of diverse disciplines who are in varied stages of completing their works. Part of the DC AAWG’s mission will be to organize and provide workshops, access to a network of peers and collaborate with local artists and businesses. We need the assistance and guidance of former DC AAWG members as well as newcomers residing in the DC/metropolitan and surrounding areas.


Please confirm your availability to attend an August, 2007 Washington DC African-American Writer’s Guild Planning Meeting by completing the attached form, in its entirety by Thursday, August 2nd, 2007. Once the time and location of the meeting are confirmed, more information will be sure to follow. Also, the Agenda will be distributed at the meeting.


This will be an awesome year! We look forward to growing exponentially with you and the DC African American Writer’s Guild. And we certainly are excited about the journey ahead.



Abundant Blessings,

Majeedah Johnson and Abdul Ali

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Interview with Sarah Browning

Abdul Ali: How did your title come to you? It's actually quite clever and appropriate..."Whiskey in the Garden of Eden." It's a dramatic incongruity.

Sarah Browning: Thank you. The title comes from a poem in the book called, “Things They Never Tell You.” The poem asks, “Was there whiskey in the garden – / heat to cool / the blood that calls / to the blue wing at the edge of the sky?”

So whiskey is both the transgressive (the bad girl in the garden) and a tonic to dampen down the longing, the blue wing. The poem concludes:

There is that apple.
They don’t say
how long Eve dreamed
of reaching

– her belly taut with the tang of it –

before she took.

At the time I wrote the poem, I was preoccupied with the question of women’s ambition and longing. I think we have a very complicated relationship to these things in our society – witness the really hateful misogyny so often directed at women who are ambitious or sexually assertive. In those years I was asking myself: What is it OK to want? I come from a family that emphasized putting others first, which is a good thing, of course, but it meant that it didn’t feel alright to want things for myself. I’m doing a lot better with this now, thanks in part to writing about it.

As an aside, I should note that titles are very hard for me in general. The book had four or five as a manuscript and I lately came across a page in a notebook on which I tried out another 15 or 20 options. I’m glad the final choice is a hit.


Abdul Ali: You sensitively deal with themes ranging from feeling like an outsider moving into a "Chocolate City" and being a political activist. Can you speak on the different voices that you assume in this work?

Sarah Browning: The fact is that I always write from who I am, we all do. I try to write from the experience as honestly as I can.

I was born into an activist family and grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the late 60s and early 70s. It was a time of war and intense social change. The neighborhood was mixed, racially and by social class. So, unlike some white people, who grow up without an awareness of their race, I have always been acutely aware of the fact that I am white and middle class (my father was an academic, my mother a social worker and then a health administrator). And of the privileges that my skin color afford me. I studied American social history in college and have worked as a community organizer in public housing and as a political organizer. So I know our history and am aware of the fact that social forces are always present in all our human interactions. A poem in the book about an encounter with a young Black man when I was 13 or so says “so much / of our history is in this moment / … 400 years that brought us to this street.”

When I moved to DC, I had lived in a very monochromatic part of Massachusetts for several years and so I was at first acutely aware of my race. And I bought a house in Petworth, a predominantly African-American neighborhood. By doing so, I am contributing to the gentrification of the city and of Petworth. I have many conflicted feelings about it: On the one hand, it is outrageous that housing prices have climbed so high that people who grew up in Petworth can’t afford to buy a house here. That long-time DC residents are being forced out of the city. On the other hand, I don’t want to live in an all-white neighborhood and I couldn’t afford to buy a house in one even if I wanted to. So I bought here. I want to live in a vibrant, diverse city, where people of all races, ethnicities, and social classes live side by side and enrich each other’s lives. That’s what I want for my child. We’ll have to work hard to make that happen and it may be too late. I don’t know.

In the poems I try to be truthful about the complexity of these issues – how they feel, how they are lived (by me, that is; of course they are lived very differently by others). As the great Sekou Sundiata, who we so sadly lost last week, said, these are questions of the first person plural; that is, they are deeply personal issues that implicate each of us personally and they are public issues as well. I try to hang out at that intersection as much as possible.

Abdul Ali: How long did it take you to complete this book? What was your hardest challenge finishing this work?

Sarah Browning: Oy – I knew someone would ask this question eventually. This is my first book of poems. I started writing seriously about 15 years ago and almost right away began publishing poems in literary journals. I first put a manuscript together 10 years ago. It bears very little resemblance to Whiskey in the Garden of Eden – just a handful of poems remain from that first version. I sent it to the ridiculous first-book prizes out there off and on (spending a ton on copying and postage costs, entry fees…), all the while revising and renaming. I had a baby. I tore the manuscript apart and sat on it for a year. Friends made very helpful suggestions on structuring it. And finally, I was fortunate enough to be approached by the folks at the Word Works, who asked me if I had a manuscript and then were kind enough to decide to publish it.

So the challenge of finding a publisher was significant. But more importantly, the poems about race, and especially about how race often played itself out on the streets of my childhood, were very difficult to write, very vulnerable, very scary (more on this below). It took me many, many years and drafts to write and complete these poems and to feel OK about putting them out in the world. And then they needed to find their right place within the book. When I finally figured out their position – in the second section called “Some Borders,” after a first section of poems written about Washington, DC, the war, raising a child in these circumstances – I realized that the book was at last done, and ready to be launched.


Abdul Ali: What sustains your activism?

Sarah Browning: That I am not alone. I find community in the other spectacular poet-activists here in DC who I am privileged to call friends, companions, inspiration. I find community in the poets I read – from Walt Whitman to June Jordan to Muriel Rukeyser to Pablo Neruda to our living contemporary writers. And I know our history: that all the great improvements to our society have come as a result of social movements: the right to vote – for women and people of color; the 40-hour work week; the end to the Vietnam War. We have a long way to go but only we can take us there, the poets and the activists. As Paulo Freire says, we make the way by walking.


Abdul Ali: Your poem "The Beautiful African American Workshop Leader Tells Us to Write About Difference" is probably one of your most vulnerable poems. You even write in all italics. Can you expand on why you made that choice? And how you navigate feeling different in the various spaces you travel through in the DC area?

Sarah Browning: The poem relates an experience I had when I was probably 6 or 7, of older Black girls throwing rocks at my friend and me as we walked home from the library, holding hands. My friend was Black and I am, obviously, white. The girls were giving my friend, who I call Robin in the poem, a hard time for being friends with a white girl. They called me a honky bitch. This was not an isolated incident but because I was so young it seared itself on my consciousness.

I tried to write about this experience for many years. But it made me very uneasy. And still does. It was a very specific historical moment – it would have been about 1969 or 1970: the height of the Black Power Movement, of separatism. And a time when Black people were feeling empowered to express their very legitimate anger at a deeply, malevolently racist society. Of course two six-year-old girls are never an appropriate target for anger, but that’s often how things work: suppressed anger explodes and the target hardly matters. Little kids, of course, don’t understand these things and there was very little discussion in my household about that anger and that threat of violence. We basically pretended it wasn’t going on.

There is a lot of silence from white people about race. Because these stories are a part of my experience of race (though only a part – I had close Black friends all through my childhood and spent many hours of warmth and grace with them and their families), I felt that it was important to write about them. But we do still live in a very racist society and I didn’t want to give fodder to the racists by telling these stories in a cavalier manner. And I certainly didn’t want to equate my experience with that of Black children who face a daily, grinding racism – from the media, popular culture, and our leaders, as well as in personal encounters from an early age. As Ethelbert Miller pointed out when we talked about this, I could easily escape this tension by leaving the city, going elsewhere, visiting relatives; while Black people live with a permanent unease and uncertainty.

So I wanted to be very careful in the way that I presented these poems. I wrote this particular poem dozens of times, trying to get it right. One of the times I wrote it, I was the only white person in a writing workshop at a conference Black Voices for Peace had organized. The workshop leader really did give us this exercise, to write about the first time we learned about difference. I wrote the story of the girls and my friend Robin, but didn’t get up and read what I’d written. Later I wrote about the uneasiness I had felt writing the story in that setting. One of the challenges with these poems was how to balance the child voice – the direct relating of the experience itself – with the adult voice of understanding what was going on. I finally realized that the title could provide that framing adult perspective. So the whole poem, the story itself, is in italics, as being remembered by the adult self, in a self-aware act of writing.

I was still wrestling with this material when I moved to DC and it has been in discussion with several writer-activists (most particularly E. Ethelbert Miller, as I mentioned before, Yael Flusberg, Michele Elliott, Becky Thompson, and Reuben Jackson) that I was able to come unstuck. I am very grateful to them and to all the other writers and activists in this city – Black, white, Latino, Asian – who have encouraged me to write honestly about race. It’s scary, but I know it is worth it. We only make progress by taking risks and talking with one another honestly, across our differences and in the presence of our similarities. I know that poetry can reach across these chasms, humanize us for one another. If we open ourselves to it. In these desperate times, I feel we don’t have a choice. We have to choose poetry.

New Poetry Journal

Please help us spread the word about this terrific new journal! Subscriptions are free (please subscribe from the web site). Thanks for your interest!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Dennis Forney (302) 645-7700 dnf@capegazette.com

NEW ONLINE JOURNAL FEATURES DELMARVA POETS

The first issue of the Delaware Poetry Review, an online magazine featuring new works from the Mid-Atlantic region, is now available. Beautifully designed, easy to navigate, and free, the Delaware Poetry Review publishes a wide range of poets, including:

Fleda Brown, Poet Laureate of Delaware,
Nin Andrews, author of 5 books of poems, including Sleeping with Houdini
Beth Joselow, author of 8 books of poems, most recently Begin at Once,
Jamie Brown, owner of John Milton & Company Books and founder of the John Milton Poetry Festival,
Rich Boucher, award-winning slam poet and co-coordinator of the Open Mic and Slam at the Crimson Moon Tavern in Wilmington,
Martin Galvin, author of Wild Card, winner of the Columbia Poetry Prize,
Ann Colwell, Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware, and
Ben Greer, author of 5 novels and one poetry collection, A Late Disorder.

The inaugural issue features 23 poets. Sixty percent of writers in the first issue live or work in Delaware or elsewhere on the Delmarva Peninsula.

The Delaware Poetry Review was formed when the editors of five well-respected, award-winning journals in Delaware, Virginia, and Washington, DC (Bay Oak Press, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Bogg, Delmarva Quarterly, Delmarva Review, and Gargoyle) decided to collaborate on a new project together. The group has met regularly each winter for the past three years at the Milton Poetry Festival in Milton, DE. "It's exciting to have this opportunity to learn from one another," says Kim Roberts of Beltway Poetry Quarterly. "We have combined our different skills to publish a truly engrossing magazine that shows off the best the Mid-Atlantic has to offer--and beyond."

To read the Delaware Poetry Review, please see: http://www.depoetry.com.

Letter to the Editor

I just sent this off to the Washington Post:

The July 24th Kids Post “Monumental Collectables” ought to be applauded for its engagement of history and variety of historical notables. It’s unfortunate; however, that Ms. Bethune’s profile contains a monumental blunder: “Mary McLeod Bethune was born to freed slaves in 1875.” How inappropriate to call someone’s parents who used to be a slave-- a slave-- given the blood-stained measures to attain freedom. This is a gross oversight whose implications are rather sobering about the state of progress at an elite newspaper. Even if the notions of freedom and bondage are murky for adults, it should at least—momentarily—be clear for young people what a contradiction is. Maybe, this wasn’t a blunder, yet a reminder that for people of color freed or enslaved, one can never escape being thought of as a slave by those who take freedom for granted.

Abdul Ali
Howard University

Monday, July 23, 2007

Local Artist Feature

One of the things I'd like to do with my blog is spotlight local artists who are doing good work. Dale Coachman is the twenty-something year old publisher of the online magazine, Scheme, who has the distinction of being the very first feature on this blog.


I met Dale Coachman at Bus Boys and Poets, a hangout, artsy, lounge-like place where creative and political people convene. Dale was spotted at Bus Boys with his business partner when he first created his online e-zine, Scheme Magazine [www.schememag.com]. Dale is very much typical of the hip hop generation: he hustles with his 9-5, yet finds time to commit to what he loves and he juggles it all so well.


Dale: hey

abdulali: Thanks for doing this interview, Dale.

Dale: np

abdulali: Can you tell me a bit about why you created Scheme Magazine?

Dale: Well I created Scheme because one night my fiance and a good friend, who is now my partner, Khary Campbell asked me within 5 minutes of each other if I ever thought about starting my own online e-zine. I've always wanted to contribute to hip hop and I can't spit a hot 16 or make beats so I figured why not. Plus the interviews I would read didn't get at what I wanted to know about these artists and individuals in the hip hop community.

abdulali: Where would you say Scheme is now? It's still under a year old, yes?

Dale: We are 6 months old.

abdulali: Congratulations! What are you learning about online publishing? About being an artist, an entrepreneur?

Dale: It's tons of work and long nights especially after my 9-5 job, but its very rewarding when you give an artist some light and they are so grateful and appreciative for being recognized and it's cool for me because we can slowly educate people and get them out of the matrix, lol

abdulali: Tell me more about the matrix, and your mission to educate people.

Dale: Well the matrix to me is what mass media has created and commodified and told the hip hop community what their hip hop is and have through every media outlet brainwashed a people and trained them to listen to certain kinds of rap music and how to somewhat socialize in hip hop culture from how to walk, talk and dress to how to approach a women or man and has told us what they think each gender ultimately wants out of the other

abdulali: In a sense, you're trying to "flip" or "rewrite" the script, huh?

Dale: Our goal is to tell people they have other options and bring back the balance of hip hop not just with the music but with the culture on a whole. Not rewrite because it was written already, but because of the dollar it has gotten away from why it was made and done

abdulali: I know this point has been addressed on numerous occasions but can you state what the difference between hip hop music and Hip Hop culture is?

Dale: We're really not trying to change much we're just trying to give people other options and different branches of music and occupations to apply their expression. To me hip hop culture is what you live and rap music is what you do, to take the statement from KRS-ONE.

abdulali: LOL. I was afraid you'd quote somebody else.

Dale: But media has really erased that line and the term has been used so much that
people call this and that hip hop. To me hip hop is something you can see hear and feel

abdulali: Where would you like to see Scheme Magazine at 1 yr old? and at 2 years old?

Dale: Well at 2 years old I would like to see it develop a print version as well. at one year I want to have enough ad sales to get to that point of print. However, we don't want beer and or liquor ads
we want Microsoft and Black Enterprise and companies that we can work with in the future

abdulali: Good for you...What can the local arts community do to contribute to Scheme Magazine?

Dale: And maybe put computers in someone's school.

abdulali: What can the local arts community do to contribute to Scheme Magazine?

Dale: Basically keep doing what their doing we just had the hip hop theatre festival the 10th Movement Session Anniversary event and in August there is the Can A Sista Rock the Mic Fest and there are plenty of artists here the reality is DC really isn't known for it's hip hop scene but I would slowly like to change that and get cats like Kev Brown, Stacey Epps, W. Ellington Felton, Oddisee and others that exposure. Hip hop does exist here.

abdulali: Are you doing anything with young people? I think every movement should begin with young people. Perhaps you can identity a HS and have the students do some freestyling or maybe some writing and learn about hip hop journalism.

Dale: well I'm trying to create a festival right here on U Street with a friend of mine and give some of the proceeds back to Duke Ellington because I heard their losing funding and have had to shut down some of their programs because of it.

abdulali: Let me know. I happen to be good friends with the Chair of the Creative Writing Program there.

Dale: Cool, I'm trying to get a proposal in order.

abdulali: Any final comments you'd like to make before we conclude this interview?

Dale: But the kids are the one's that are going to change hip hop culture and the music so it's important we give them more than Young Jeezy, Jay-Z and Lil' Wayne and Flavor Flav and that show A hot Ghetto Mess. Just keep your mind and you ear open to new and different things and be a leader not a follower just because the music is played on the radio and a certain form of hip hop is given to you that doesn't mean you have to accept it

abdulali: I agree. I think our young people just need the tools to critically decode some of the messages that are sent their way via media via hip hop

Dale: Very much so...

abdulali: This has been fun, will you let me call you so I can rap to you for a few....?

Dale: Sure, one final thing

abdulali: uh huh?

Dale: ok I'm done. Nah, but really, lol. I think the minute we labeled this expression we we're in trouble because it's already boxed in. Why can't we just have artists just make good music. Do people want to be known as a great hip hop artists or just a great artist or musician.

Art Matters

Did anyone read the Metro section of the Washington Post today? There was a large picture of the most beautiful little black ballerinas. The story was about a recreation center that opened two years ago in the Anacostia area. Art really does matter. Can you imagine a world without some kind of something to do?

Sunday, July 22, 2007

See Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez


Amiri BarakaSonia Sanchez
Thursday, August 02, 2007 From 7:30 PM to 10:00 PM Central Park SummerStage
Two literary giants from the Black Power era read from their latest and greatest.

http://www.summerstage.org/index.aspx?lobid842&page=2

Launch of Blog

I just got back from the Hurston-Wright Writer's Week at AU. It will be a long time before I forget the bonds created over words. As promised there are a few things I wanted my fellow writers to know about:

a) If you'd like to submit a 200-300 word paragraph about your experience this past week send it to me at poeticnoise1984@aol.com

b) If you'd like to submit something to Howard's literary journal, The Amistad, check out submission guidelines and past issues here www.coas.howard.edu/english/publications-amistad.html

c) I would like all of the High School students from Writers' Week to submit the poem or their short story that you read during open mic to me so I can do a special feature of your work for the Journal.

Best to you,

abdul ali