Books by Kalamu ya Salaam

The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement  /   360: A Revolution of Black Poets

Everywhere Is Someplace Else: A Literary Anthology  /  From A Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets

Our Music Is No Accident   /  What Is Life: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self

My Story My Song (CD)

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five. a decade of development

My goal is to uplift people, as much as I can. To inspire them to realize more and more of their capacities for living meaningful lives.--John William Coltrane

            By the time Hofu ni Kwenu (my fear is for you), my second poetry book, appeared in 1973, some of the BLKARTSOUTH crew had started Ahidiana, an activist oriented collective. FST closed down for a lack of funds. Due to an argument between John O'Neal, one of the FST founders, and some of us from the workshop, BLKARTSOUTH split off on its own.  This was at the same period as Ahidiana was founded.

            Ahidiana ran an alternative school for preschool through third grade aged children -- and we always made sure that kids from working class backgrounds were the majority of students. We were not interested in operating a little "private academy" populated mainly by the children of Black professionals.

            We also had a food co-op to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. We had a small garden. We operated a book store and owned and operated a press. We brought speakers and activists (such as Amiri Baraka, John Henrik Clarke, Mari Evans, Yusef ben Jochannan, Maulana Ron Karenga, Haki Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez, Owusu Saudaki, and Sweet Honey In The Rock) to the New Orleans community. And finally, we organized around community issues and around Kwanzaa activities.

            Our organizing work included demonstrations against apartheid and police brutality, as well as challenges to the mainstream media based on FCC mandated community access issues (which the Republicans dismantled as soon as they got in control at the federal level). Our organizing also included annual Black Women's Conferences which attracted attendees from around the country.

            Our experiences in FST/BLKARTSOUTH helped us understand how to organize and how to dramatize issues. Our experiences as artists raised the qualitative appearance of our political presentations to a very high level. Concomitantly, the political issues sharpened my artistic work. My work became both more explicit and more specific. Even though we had moved pass simplistic sloganeering, I still had a lot to learn about writing poetry. Ahidiana was my graduate program.

            Here are two poems which exemplify the merging of the artistic and the political. The first is a poem in support of the political prisoner Dessie Woods who was imprisoned for killing a White man who attempted to rape her. She never denied the shooting. This was one of favorite performance pieces. It is an ironic commentary written in the feminine voice, a technique which I had developed not as a gimmick but rather as a way of making a statement not only about whatever particular issue the poem dealt with but also a statement about how I felt revolutionary male writers should be addressing issues and supporting the feminist anti-sexist struggle. Most often when we performed these type of poems, either my wife, Tayari kwa Salaam, or Shawishi St. Julien voiced the poem.

            The second poem is a defense of Ntozake Shange which was published in an issue of Al Young and Ishmael Reed's Quilt magazine. This poem was written and published during the backlash against Ntozake Shange that many males were whipping up over "Colored Girls." This was the kind of piece that put me at odds with some of my fellow male writers. That was O.K. with me, in fact I enjoyed the confrontation.

            We in Ahidiana believed that confrontation of contradictions among our people was healthy as long as the contradictions were debated and hopefully resolved without resorting to violence among ourselves. I was aware, however, that in certain circles, this piece amounted to "fighting words."

            Ahidiana was a product of its time. Today there is no similar pan-african movement, no similar Black liberation struggle in the 90s. Yes, there is the Afro-centric movement, but that movement is far from community based. The majority of the Afro-centricity leadership is based on college campuses, and mainly predominately mainstream campuses at that. While I hear and understand a lot of the theory, the practice is not community rooted and community dependent. Nor is this movement linked to international struggles, which was another driving force supporting and encouraging our efforts in the early seventies.

            Hofu was the first book produced by Ahidiana and it reflected our activist orientation. We described it as "A collection of essays and poetry written by Kalamu ya Salaam which explains and defines the natural functions of men and women and the relationship between men and women." From Hofu on, every poetry book I wrote during the Ahidiana years came out of specific social contexts and was meant to influence our community at large and to directly affect those of us engaged in the Black liberation struggle.

            Those who have never volunteered to be a cultural guerrilla at war with the dominant and dominating culture probably can not understand both the exhilaration and the freedom involved in creating socially committed literature.

            The exhilaration is perhaps more obvious than the freedom. It is both humbling and uplifting to present your poetry and witness people react in honest and deep-felt ways: to see people laugh and, sometimes, even cry; to have people come up to you their eyes shinning about how your work helped them make it through the semester, through a marital dispute, while in jail, while in the army, etc.; to hear people chant your poems back to you, hear them clap and pat their feet as the audience participates; to hear them shout out to you "teach," "right on"; to be there at the creation of a new consciousness, that is exhilarating, an exhilaration unknown to the literary poet whose work is appreciated in solitude. For here we have the circle completed, the feedback loop is immediate. Here we have the actualization of one of the cardinal tenets of the Black aesthetic: immediate "call and response."

            The calabash of community is reconstructed, the circle is unbroken. At the deepest level one must ask what is art without an audience? Furthermore, if audience is necessary for art to exist than should not the involvement of the audience be as timely as possible? Moreover, the audience responding not only exhilarated us it pushed us to produce more and better art, art that was cleaner, leaner and more pure in its connection with the audience.

            No matter what "thought" we had, the test was to find a way to communicate it. How to convey the concept of dialectics in a poetry reading at a community center, on a playground, to preschoolers, at the college campus. Our audiences were wherever our people were and our challenge was to reach all of them. Of course this required crafting and composing different poems for different segments of the community, and also required us to expand the general conception of poetry, but, as we became better and better at it, we perceived each challenge not as a problem but rather as an opportunity. This was an exhilarating time.

            The freedom of it is less obvious but no less real. Essentially it boils down to the fact that we had no masters. We had broken off the plantation of literary poetry and had no maps, no set destination, no preordained models to which we had to adhere.

            We had to be truly creative. We had to improvise. Our freedom was precisely that we could use any and everything we wanted to in whatever way we wanted to.

            Some of us wrote in rhyme, others of us didn't. Some of us had a college education and had been exposed to all kinds of literature, others of us were people with a deficient public school education (when integration came, the quality of education which we had received at schools like Phyliss Wheatley and Rivers Frederick suffered a serious decline). Some of us were writing in dialect, others of us weren't. But again, the principles of the Black aesthetic guided us: it's not what you do but the way that you do it.

            Moreover, because our people are human beings who represent the broadest spectrum of emotions and intellectual proclivities of any community in the United States, there was always an audience for almost any style of poetry we wanted to write. Plus we had numerous poetic examples to draw on within our own culture: from the jazzy surrealism of Bob Kaufman (who was from New Orleans), to the formalism of Robert Hayden, from the hip street talk of Don L. Lee/Haki Madhubuti and Sonia Sanchez to the literary arcaneness of Melvin Tolson and the classical rigor of Gwendolyn Brooks, it was all there for us.

            Sonia would be killing with her signifying pieces one minute and kissing us with the awe inspiring quiet of a haiku the next. Baraka could make us scream out loud or send us scurrying to a dictionary to figure out what he was talking about. And that was just on the creation side.

            On the audience side, the people who came out to hear us were so hip. Some of them knew more poetry than we did. They would give us tips. Tell us about poets, some of them locals whom we had never heard of and whom we needed to know. Whatever idea we dropped, usually there was somebody in the audience who would pick up on it and afterwards want to rap about "that thing you said, well, you know I was thinking..."

            In our audiences you might find a person who had ardently studied Shakespeare sitting next to a barroom bard for whom toasting, signifying and reciting his own version of "Shine" was the highest form of poetry. Our task was to reach both of them, to feel free to draw on both of their experiences, and to use all of that and more of that in everything we did.

            For us being Black was a blessing. As Americans we could learn from, and if we chose (which few in our collective did), we could even emulate the mainstream literary world, and, at the same time, as African Americans we could draw on a rich culture of orature that the literary mainstream knew little, if anything, about. Moreover, we also had our music (the only indigenous American contribution to world culture) and our people's musical usage of English to draw on. We had so much, so much.

            In addition to our abundance of influences and the dual traditions we had to draw on, we also had the seventies atmosphere of revolutionary freedom. In our poetry everything was permissible. There were no scared cows. We could quote anyone we wanted to, or quote no one. We could use techniques from traditional poetry or invent techniques based on music. With so much happening daily around you, there was no excuse not to write.

            In this context work just poured out of me. I would write about everything: hanging my foot out the window after making love, a demonstration against police brutality, hair styles, dance styles, Pan-Afrikanism, sexism. The window was throwed up high and fortunately, by the seventies I had been writing for over a decade so I had a degree of facility that comes from practice, practice and more practice -- plus, I had an audience.

            I was writing for the members of Ahidiana: I wrote wedding poems, praise poems, poems and songs for our kids who were now appearing with regularity. I was writing for the community: all kinds of demonstrations were happening and a rally wasn't a rally until at least one poet was called upon to give some "poetic inspiration." All kinds of Black journals were popping up and there was always a need for a cogent and timely or topical poem. I was also writing for myself.

            As I worked out ideas, theories and understandings of whatever I was experiencing or grappling with, I would know I had reached a degree of understanding when I could put it in a poem and communicate it to others. Eventually I called these poems "sun songs" because they were partly sermons delivered in the style of Baptist preachers and partly because they invariably relieved heavily on musical motifs, musical metaphors, and musical organizational methodologies and techniques. I would beat on podiums, stomp on floors. Sing. Shout. Jump up and down. Dance. After all I was a poet.

            If I couldn't express myself in poetry it just meant that whatever I was trying to express was unclear in my own mind, or else what I was thinking was out of phase with what I was feeling. In that sense my poetry was very, very private in its origins and orientation at the same time that it was public in its expression. That was the dialectic that made the most sense to me.

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