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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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Black Stacey: Saul
Williams
my generational
son, the punk-hop poet/musician
By Kalamu ya
Salaam
new orleans, 22 nov. 2004. when he
got in my car, i told him i was proud of him, “very
proud, really.”
it hardly seemed
over a decade ago when we sat on the carpeted floor
together in a barely furnished apartment in atlanta. he
was at morehouse. my daughter kiini was at spelman. and
their small group of friends, the red clay collective,
was groping forward toward a glorious future, or more
accurately groping toward a gloriously-hoped-for future.
they were poets and writers, photographers and dancers,
some were into the hard sciences, not saul williams, he
was a philosophy major.
they published a
journal and i contributed writing and advice. after
graduation when a hard core of them, kiini included,
moved to new york, saul would go to graduate school at
nyu in acting. kiini traveled for a year and then did a
masters in publishing at pace university.
i would visit them
in new york, not often but whenever i visited it was
good to get together with them. their energy was
energizing to me; always left me with more to
contemplate, inspired to do more. at one program they
asked me to read poetry in a feature spot—kiini cried
that night, so happy, so proud.
in later years, as
saul’s star rose, he and i would sometimes share
platforms and panels—once in boston i stood with him as
old heads attacked what they perceived as the
irrelevance of these black youth for whom blackness was
neither a badge of honor nor courage; indeed, from the
youth perspective, their blackness was, in fact, not a
badge of any kind.
many of us, the
black power generation of parents, never dreamed of
children who were not focused on the color, culture, and
consciousness of their/our blackness.
now, in 2004, our
future has arrived but the reality of our social
landscape is no dream zone; bitterness sours our
intergenerational relationships. it’s complex. it’s
blatant. it’s infuriating. it’s tough being black in the
21st century if you were born before the sixties. and
it’s even tougher relating to today’s young people,
particularly those born in the eighties or later.
we old heads
figured that if richard pryor could publicly give up the
word nigger, well nobody had an excuse to keep slinging
that epithet. but little did we know that eddie murphy,
crouch-grabbing, cursing and generally acting like a,
well, like a niggah, was only the beginning. murphy was
cool compared to martin, and def comedy jam, and gangsta
rap, and shit, what the fuck is going on? these young
negroes really are crazy!
i once asked a
group of young people what they thought was the biggest
problem with “today’s youth.” one perceptive young man
fired back without a moment of hesitation: “today’s
adults.”
and i knew
precisely what he meant. there is not only a disconnect,
there is also deep disappointment. young and old look at
each other and are thoroughly uncomfortable with what
the other has become. are these our children/are these
my parents? what happened to them?
except for the
older men still trying to hit on the younger women, most
of my peers are uncomfortable around young people.
whereas, i tend to be uncomfortable around many of my
nostalgia-loving, over-50 peers, a significant number of
whom are former rebels now turned responsible citizens.
as saul and i sat
in café nicaud, he drinking a latte and eating a
portabella mushroom and avocado sandwich with a fruit
salad cup on the side, me chugging down nantucket
lemonade, our conversation unfolded at a leisurely pace.
i asked him what he
was up to.
he was in town for
a gig at the house of blues with his band.
same band as
amethyst (which was a rock group he led for his first
album)?
no. this was
stripped down, a quartet. he was now into “punk-hop,”
kind of a mixture of punk and hip hop. violin,
turntables & bass, i believe he said drums, and i know
saul said he was doing guitar.
i didn’t know he played guitar.
he didn’t really play. he kind of
just played what he wanted to play.
ok, i thought, i’m sure that’s an
interesting aggregation.
we talked on about
his daughter saturn, his son (i forget his name). i had
met saturn in new york, but never met his son. they have
different mothers. saul is a twice-time, proud
father/single parent—he had been the primary care-giver
for his daughter for two years while marcia returned to
college for a masters.
i asked saul about
acting. he said he really wanted to continue acting, if
he could get good parts. he was signed on for a handful
of films he looked forward to but none of them had yet
been “greenlighted.” actors actually spend more time
waiting for other people to get their act together than
they do actually acting.
saul’s music career
was not so interesting to me because i’m not into the
type of music he’s making. saul views it as a role he’s
developing for himself, a role that gives him a
platform, partially because, as saul explained, actors
don’t have a public platform. even when they get a hit
movie, as he had with slam, they don’t get to interact
with their audiences and say whatever they want to tell
folk.
i was more
interested in his writing career. saul told me about his
next book, which he is committed to delivering to his
publisher (mtv, yeah, mtv is publishing books) in late
may 2005. i won’t give away the subject matter, except
to say it is a mix of fiction and autobiography (parts
of the book are literal transcriptions from saul’s
journaling). as saul described the structure of his
book, a point snapped into focus.
then saul got a
cell call from frosty, his tour manager, he had to get
back to check out early because they were going to get
on the road right after the show rather than leave in
the morning as originally planned. but before we left,
saul urged me to finish making the point about the
differences going down.
our relationship to
race was radically different. he with his dark skin and
nappy-headed fro—you know, not neatly trimmed like a
superfly, more like the raggedness of a runaway whose
head knows neither comb nor scissors. i, with my dark
skin (although a shade or two lighter than saul), and my
grey beard and uncut-but-not-uncombed afro, we could
easily have passed for father and son, except we were
talking amicably, laughing, and enjoying each other’s
company.
i explained that in
the seventies there was a major clash between the black
power folk and the integrationists. we believed in
nationtime and worked hard at creating alternatives:
political organizations, schools, musical groups that
didn’t include whites, hell, some of our venues didn’t
even allow whites in the audience. and also at the same
time we were doing that, there was a major push to
counter our every move with mainstream supported,
integrationist organizations. thus, at the height of the
black arts theatre movement, rockerfeller and/or ford
funded, in a major way, the “negro” ensemble company.
how much clearer could they make it that there was a
battle going on for the hearts and minds of black folk?
moreover, the mainstream did not intend to concede one
iota, indeed, they intended to win. and win they did.
i pointed out to
saul that i recently read that the venerable dance
theatre of harlem was defunct, kaput, finished,
stick-a-fork-in-them; they started up in harlem teaching
ballet at a time when blacks in modern dance were doing
eleo pomare or else following chuck davis into
institutionalizing african dance among african americans.
and it was but a short pirouette from n.e.c. and d.t.h.
to the modern day golddust twins, colin & condi. as i
pointed out to saul, the twins had been groomed to do
the jobs they were doing and they were good at it.
we have a whole
generation of black folk who are deep into americanism,
which reductively means into western values: fundamental
christianity, winner-take-all democracy and global
capitalism. but that was a choice and that was their
right to choose to do so, even as i felt it my
responsibility to chart a separate course. a course
which includes a complex relationship to whites in
general.
i recalled
attending the sixth pan african conference in tanzania
and meeting liberation leaders and seeing their european
spouses. we had thought the struggle was for black
freedom. both saul and i laughed as he said, yeah, it
meant to be free to marry europeans.
part of me
understood. during the civil rights era, the union of
interracial couples was a very specific, and often very
brave, political statement, a statement that could not
be easily dismissed (even though many of us were often
casually contemptuous of such relationships). and, as i
told saul, today i co-direct a writing program in the
orleans public schools. my fellow co-director and
founder of the program is jim randels, a
twenty-year-veteran public school teacher and union
organizer. we work at black high schools. some of the
kids call jim “jesus” because of his appearance: beard,
long hair and white skin: the irony, of course, is that
jim does not really look like jesus looked, only like
the picture that europe has enshrined of how racists
wanted jesus to look. many of the older teachers hate
jim, for them he represents white supremacy still
asserting itself in what they perceived is the guise of
benevolence. yet, their politics is the flip story.
on the one hand,
white-skinned jim is opposed to the status quo. on the
other hand dark-skinned colleagues want to force our
students to conform to the american way. i know where i
stand on that issue, but i also know that race
camouflages the major class, cultural, and identify
contradictions. this is a hard issue to deal with
because of the emotional buttons that integration
continues to push, less so with the youth, more so with
the adults.
saul grunts and
relates experiences in brazil where folk were asking him
what did it feel like to be fire-hosed, and he had to
explain that it was his parents’ generation who were
fire-hosed, not him. but the brazilians with their
history-lives tradition, found it hard to understand
saul saying he and his parents were fundamentally
different.
likewise, we, the
parents of the saul williams-es of the world, wanted our
children to be free of the burden of racism, but at the
same time we tacitly expected them to wave the flag of
racial solidarity—an action our children rightly
perceive as equally burdensome. but there was more.
i got around to one
of the harder aspects of our relationships while driving
saul back to the hotel, which once had been a major
department store and was now remolded as a luxury french
quarter location. tourism is how new orleans’ makes its
money. saul had wondered aloud about the young kids tap
dancing on the sidewalk, hustling chump change, their
bare torsos shinning, their air jordan sneakers with
bottle caps embedded in the soles as surrogate taps.
what could one say: don’t dance for your supper? in one
way or another, don’t we all dance to the system’s piper
in order to receive money?
“i believe we males
are divided by the absent father syndrome.” saul quietly
listened. it’s the dominant social reality of black
family life. we older men are not there. and i wasn’t
saying it as some lofty abstraction—i am in my second
marriage. although i have a good relationship with my
offspring, there was a time when i was not there.
far too many of our
young men wouldn’t recognize their fathers if they were
confronted at gunpoint. this male alienation, youth from
elder, also too often unavoidably leads to a psychosis
of self-hatred as young men father children but are
estranged from the mothers of those children, except
that the manifestation of the self-hatred is actualized
in a visceral hatred by the single-father young black
man for the absent-father older black man.
as we pulled up to
the hotel, saul tentatively asked if i had time to
attend his show, he would put my name at the door,
although he knew i was really busy and probably didn’t
have . . . i told him i would try to make it. we both
knew a 10:30pm, punk-hop show wasn’t my particular cup
of herbal peppermint tea.
i had forgotten
that saul was coming to town, so i was pleasantly
surprised when he had called me before noon the morning
of the show. it was a touching act of filial respect. he
didn’t have to reach out. i immediately suggested we go
out for coffee, tea, or whatever. he agreed. now he was
inviting me to go out. would i agree?
finding agreement
is the question confronting our respective generations:
can we agree to support each other, agree to participate
in each other’s lives, even as we recognize that
although we are both black, we are actually born of two
different worlds, actually see each other and our
respective futures in two different and sometimes
contentious ways?
* * * * *
embracing black stacey
new orleans, 22 nov.
2004. when he came off the stage, even though i was
standing near the steps, he didn’t see me. they had done
a high energy set for over an hour, i knew the
spaced-out look that was in his eyes.
at such moments you
don’t really be seeing what is physically before you.
you are seeing everything you remember from those past
moments of using the power of performance to hurl
yourself into the way-out-a-sphere, you are still
immersed in that floating feeling, remembering your
imagination boosted by the adrenalin of art creation. as
he turned to head to the green room, i caught up to him
quickly and shouted out a greeting. he turned.
recognized. and embraced me like a lover, full body
press. we were lovers and my presence made clear, in a
way that no words or nothing else could: i care. i love.
you. brother. son. man.
i’m glad you came.
i’m glad i came.
and we smiled at
each other saying nothing for a couple of seconds. just
smiling.
i was glad i got a
chance to see the set. the punk element was really
strong, as was the spoken word. saul is really figuring
a way to mix it up. there were a number of moments i
really, really liked although approximately 25% of the
time the music, the beats, were so loud the words were
indecipherable. but when you could hear, saul gave you
an earful.
one headbanger had
the hook: where my niggaz at? and the answer was
incarcerated, in the military (“some benefits and a
gun”). then there was a song called african student
movement, during which saul cajoled us: instead of
fighting for them, why not fight for health care,
education . . . you get the point. but it was not all
protest and hard beats, there was a tender moment—which
is oxymoronic to talk about tenderness and punk-hop in
the same breath, but tender is what it was.
saul started off
making a point of what he saw as a difference between
emcees and poets, the image of being hard and the
reality of being human. he spoke out against
“motherfuckers” whom he defined as anyone/everyone that
denigrated and disrespected the feminine. saul
challenged us to have the heart to acknowledge our human
hearts. beautiful.
i watched the
audience of approximately 120 people on a monday night
in the “parish,” which is the new orleans house of
blues’ small upstairs venue. the three-fifths filled
room was approximately 75% white and 99.9 percent young.
yours truly was the .1 percent that was old. at one
point when saul was talking between numbers, someone
asked for more beats and less talk. saul talked on.
another time someone was on a cell phone, no, they were
taking a picture...
another interesting
note is that there was a hard core of saul-heads down
front. on more than a few occasions, as saul recited a
number they knew, the followers would loudly declaim the
hook lines in unison with saul. it was undeniable: saul
had found a way to penetrate into the consciousness of a
core of folk in new orleans without the aid of radio and
television, which was in fact one of saul’s objectives.
earlier when he told me that going commercial was a way
to reach folk, i nodded but retained reservations—how
many times had i heard musicians say when i get famous
i’m going to really come out with some stuff. my
experience and analysis suggests that if you ain’t doing
it when you’re unknown, you would not be likely to do it
when you had fame and fortune at stake. but saul is not
weighted down with my perspective.
for me, punk-hop is
far, far removed from anything commercial, but saul has
a recording deal, has a video about to be aired on mtv,
has a book publishing deal, is making movies. so, the
reality is: he’s commercial. and the reality also is
he’s saying something and reaching people. more power to
him. still, this is not my kind of scene, not the kind
of venue i desire nor the type of music i enjoy.
but, even so, i
realize, not only should i tolerate it, i should also
embrace it and learn from what saul is doing. why?
simply because when i was him, i too was striking out in
startling new directions, directions that my parents
would not have explored. he was black like i had been, i
was then and am now no blacker than he.
for my money (i had
a complimentary admission, but if i had paid to get in,
for my money . . . ) the best number was black stacey,
an autobiographical number about growing up the son of
haitian parents, his father a minister, and he
dark-skinned and skinny. he talked about some of his
more self-depreciating moments, and then hollered out
the chorus: blaccckkkk stacey (which is his middle
name).
he left nothing on
the stage. was holding back nothing. gave it his all.
the veins on the side of his neck buldging. his eyes
bugging. throwing himself spastically into some of the
more hyper-energetic numbers.
once again i was
proud of what he was doing, even though it was clear he
couldn’t play guitar (thankfully he only stabbed out
chords on one number, wisely relying mostly on his mouth
chops rather than his non-existant guitar chops—yet,
wait a minute, this is punk, and it doesn’t matter that
you are still learning some of the basics of your craft.
even though we had
been standing at the foot of the stage steps less than
five seconds, a bunch of stuff ran through my head in
the brief interval. the crowd was hollering wildly, they
wanted more.
saul leaned into
me. “you know that piano poem?”
he was talking
about my cecil taylor homage, “let me ‘splain it to ya.”
i had to tell him no, i didn’t know it by heart. he
asked me, you sure you don’t know it. i knew where this
was going. he wanted to call me up to do a number with
him for the encore. i declined. i told him, no, i didn’t
remember it.
earlier while he
was performing, there had been a couple of mili-moments
when i thought about what i would do if i was on the
stage, but no, this was saul’s night, this was his time,
not mine. i didn’t need to be out there, especially
since performing in this kind of venue was not something
i wanted to do.
saul jumped back on
the stage with his band. acknowledged me on mic and then
they did two numbers. since i was now standing
backstage, behind the bank of speakers, it was even more
difficult to hear the words, but i watched the drummer.
he was pounding full force, but while knocking out the
hard rock rhythm, he was also mouthing the lyrics,
clearly enjoying playing as much as the raucous crowd
enjoyed receiving the music. it was a moment of oneness.
afterwards, saul
asked, you want to come back, i said, no. i was headed
home to get some sleep. i didn’t need to hang out with
the band and the other young people who would invariably
be there surrounding saul, one of the major voices of
their generation. this was their time to step forward,
and, in that specific context, my time to offer
background support.
i didn’t need to
hang out. it was sufficient that i had come and seen him
perform, and had been there to embrace him when he came
off the stage.
Source:
WordUp
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Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
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Guarding the Flame of Life
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New Orleans Jazz Funeral for tuba player Kerwin
James /
They danced atop his casket Jaran 'Julio' Green
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Track List
1. Congo Square (9:01)
2. My Story, My Song (20:50)
3. Danny Banjo (4:32)
4. Miles Davis (10:26)
5. Hard News For Hip Harry (5:03)
6. Unfinished Blues (4:13)
7. Rainbows Come After The Rain (2:21)/Negroidal Noise (15:53)
8. Intro (3:59)
9. The Whole History (3:14)
10. Negroidal Noise (5:39)
11. Waving At Ra (1:40)
12. Landing (1:21)
13. Good Luck (:04) |
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music website >
http://www.kalamu.com/bol/
writing website >
http://wordup.posterous.com/
daily blog >
http://kalamu.posterous.com
twitter >
http://twitter.com/neogriot
facebook >
http://www.facebook.com/kalamu.salaam
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Male Male-Intimacy in Early
America
Beyond Romantic Friendships
By
William Benemann
Previously hard-to-find information on
homosexuality in early America—now in a
convenient single volume! Few of us are
familiar with the gay men on General
Washington’s staff or among the leaders of
the new republic. Now, in the same way that
Alex Haley’s Roots provided a generation of
African Americans with an appreciation of
their history,
Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond
Romantic Friendships will give many
gay readers their first glimpse of
homosexuality as a theme in early American
history.
Male-Male Intimacy in Early America
is the first book to provide a comprehensive
overview of the role of homosexual activity
among American men in the early years of
American history.
Male-Male Intimacy in Early America is the
first book to provide a comprehensive
overview of the role of homosexual activity
among American men in the early years of
American history. |
 |
This single
source brings together information that has until
now been widely scattered in journals and distant
archives. The book draws on personal letters,
diaries, court records, and contemporary
publications to examine the role of homosexual
activity in the lives of American men in the
colonial period and in the early years of the new
republic. The author scoured research that was
published in contemporary journals and also
conducted his own research in over a dozen US
archives, ranging from the Library of Congress to
the Huntington Library, from the United Military
Academy Archives to the Missouri Historical
Society.—Routledge
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 24 October 2010
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