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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
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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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Interview with Award Winning Neo-Griot
Kalamu ya Salaam
1
NOMMO Literary Society
Rudy:
Kalamu, I'd like to begin our talk with
a discussion of your work with the NOMMO Literary
Society. How do you keep the Society together? How do you keep
the poets coming, working seriously on their writing skills?
Kalamu: I don’t. Folk either want
to come and do so or they don’t. What I do is be very
consistent. Except when I am out of town, every Tuesday I am
there. I have a magnificent library of both books and music as a
reference to help writers develop. I also assist in pointing
people toward publishing opportunities.
Rudy: In your direction of NOMMO,
what approach do you use? I mean how do you get a young writer
to reconsider their topics or techniques? Do you sometimes shoot
from the hip and say that’s crap, that’s not fully baked, or
say go back to the woodshed with that one?
Kalamu: My approach is to offer a
wide array of examples and influences. As to how effective I am,
I think some of the members can answer that far more accurately
than I can. There is no formal membership. Folks come and go.
It’s wide open.
Our three-part format is 1. collective
study, 2. announcements (which we call housekeeping), and 3.
reading of original work and receiving of feedback. Generally, I
am responsible for selecting what will be the subject of the
collective study. Whatever it is, we take turns reading aloud
and then discuss what we have read. This way we ensure a minimum
common level of information.
The pieces range from formal studies of
writing to creative work to essays about various topics. Less
than 25% of what we study is specifically black-oriented.
Announcements usually take only a few minutes. Reading original
work and receiving feedback varies based on what folk bring to
the table. In general, we are brutal with ourselves in giving
criticism to regular members and very, very considerate of new
members. We generally have more prose writers than poets per se.
I think that is because NOMMO emphasizes "writing"
rather than "reciting." Performance is seldom the
focus of any of what we do. As a result, the young poets who
pass by from time to time don’t usually stay for any extended
time.
As for telling folk what to do, or what to
write, or how to write, I freely give comments, but I am not the
only one and I am careful to make sure that the comments of
others are valued. Plus, our associate workshop director,
Paulette Richards, is a Ph.D. who teaches English and creative
writing at Loyola University. Other dynamics of our workshop are
covered in an introduction I have done for the next collection
of workshop writings, "Speak the Truth to the People."
Rudy: Is your work with the Society
related to your teaching radio production and digital video to
high school students? Do you find recruits for the Society among
these students?
Kalamu: So far, there has been no
overlap between the students I teach at the high school level
and the NOMMO workshop. I have been teaching in the
"students at the center" program for four years now.
It is a learning process for me, a major learning process.
Learning to teach what I know. Teaching has forced me to
conceptualize and organize my information so that I can share
it. I do very little recruiting for NOMMO.
Actually, I am not trying to increase the
size of the workshop. We have a steady, core group of five to
six writers and that seems to work well in terms of development.
And from year to year there is always a turnover. Some folk
moving on, new folk joining. Oh, one other thing. There are a
couple of folk I mentor long distance via the internet,
telephone and occasional in-person get togethers. Those are
exceptions. And I certainly don’t want to take on any more.
But that is another aspect of what I do.
Rudy: I still do not have a clear
picture of the writers who are members of NOMMO. I assume they
are all black. When you took me to a poetry set one night in New
Orleans, I assumed some of those young people were in your
group. Were they? How would you characterize those who are in
NOMMO? Who are some of the writers who are now in NOMMO, who
have passed through NOMMO?
Kalamu: If I remember correctly,
only one of the writers you heard that night was a NOMMO member.
Yes, NOMMO is a workshop for Black writers. At least 75% of our
writers are female, and the majority are in late twenties to
mid-thirties. Our youngest member is Sukari Ua, she is a
16-year-old high school student. I am currently the oldest at
55. We have a couple of folk in their early 40s. Some of our
writers are self-taught, as I am, and others are formally
trained.
We don’t have any writers who have made a
big splash nationally, although a number of our writers are
included in recent anthologies such as
Role Call,
Step Into A
World, the
Def
Poetry Jam anthology, and E. Ethelbert Miller’s
new anthology
Beyond the Frontier, as well as Afaa Weaver’s
new anthology about African American families (due out in August
2002) [These
Hands I Know]. Freddi Evans, one of our older members, both in terms of
age and in terms of how long she has been in the workshop,
recently published a children’s book [A
Bus of Our Own] that won a major award.
We plan to publish a second book by Freddi, the History of Congo
Square.
Rudy: NOMMO is more than just a
group of people. You have a place, a building in the middle of
the community that is emblematic of a poetic, writing activity
that goes on. Can NOMMO be duplicated in other cities? Does it
need someone like Kalamu ya Salaam to make it work, long-lived?
Do you think NOMMO will exist beyond you? Has NOMMO been
duplicated in other cities?
Kalamu:
Can NOMMO be duplicated as a writing workshop in general, yes;
in particular the way we do it, probably not. Yes, our approach
needs someone to take the responsibility of setting up a
literary liberated zone, collecting and maintaining a library of
books and music, and having the patience to work at the same
project for five or ten years without getting tired. I have not
even considered trying to duplicate NOMMO in another place. On
the other hand, I hope that we can serve as an example to others
and, in fact, be surpassed by what other folk are doing.
Next 2>> * *
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Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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January 2012
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