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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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public schools killed in new orleans
kalamu on the road 9 oct 2005
we will fight back. we will resist
it is hard. it ain't fair. but it is what it
is. right now i'm in clemson, south carolina. seems like i've
been traveling forever. last week i was in new york city. the
week before i was at cornell in ithaca, new york.
i had planned to do reports and updates from the road. but it is
extremely difficult to keep up. i will endeavor to do better,
but i'm not making any promises, other than i'll do my best to
at least let you know where i'm going and where i been.
the cornell gig turned out extremely well. myself and three
others did a panel, "hurricane katrina and its aftermath:
race, class and the environment" moderated by robert l.
harris, professor of africana studies and vice provost for
diversity and faculty development." it started with a
newsclip from democracy now highlighting the unwillingess
of the police, the military and other authorities refused to
remove a dead body that lay in the streets for two weeks. this
was in the algiers section of new orleans, which did not flood.
during the report all manner of authorities past by and even
talked with the reporter from democracy now, but all of
them refused to deal with the body, invariably saying it was
somebody else's responsibility.
syracuse university professor kishi animashaun, spoke on the
enviornmental impacts in the greater new orleans region,
detailing issues of toxicity and land erosion, significant
issues whose impact will continue to be felt for years and
years. malik rahim, a resident of the algiers section of new
orleans, which did not flood, spoke about actively supporting
the people. malik did not leave the city during the storm and in
its aftermath organized local, national and international
support for his neighbors and the general algiers community.
malik is a former black panther who had run for office as a city
councilman on the green party ticket.
i spoke third and opened with a poem "a
system of thought," based on coltrane techniques with
lyrics that reflected the katrina reality and then went on to
detail our listen to the people project (a full report
about listen to the people will be forthcoming this
week). the program closed with quiet, albeit steel strong,
testimony from folake akande, a graduate student in african
feminist literature at tulane university who is now studying at
cornell. folake spoke about how it was the elders who guided and
protected her through her travails in the shelters and upon
arriving to cornell.
at cornell i made a lot of good contacts, including ira revels
who has agreed to take a leadership role in our listen to the
people project. from cornell i returned to new orleans and
then it was on to new york city. i was preceded by a long
feature story in the new yorker about katrina. in that
story i was quoted in some detail and given the last words of
the article with a long quote about the forthcoming long, cold
winter that new orleanians in exile will face. while in new york
i had a couple of meetings during the day and made a poetry
presentation at the bowery poetry club on friday night, followed
by a discussion with a small audience at the caribbean cultural
center.
we also did our first video interview for listen
to the people with adrina kelly, an early graduate of our
students at the center program and a graduate of harvard
university who works in new york city as an editor at mcgraw
hill publishing. although adrina graduated from high school
before i joined the sac program, it turns out that i worked with
adrina's mother at the black collegian magazine (when we
discovered that, neither of us was surprised because in new
orleans everybody knows somebody who knows somebody, at most
there are two degrees of separation).
i reported on arriving into new york and never finished the
report, time just was not there. it has been constant motion.
i'm way behind on a couple of writing assignments, pushing hard
to maintain e-drum every day and breath of life every week, plus
develop listen to the people and publicly launch the website,
which will be up within six or seven day—will announce that
shortly.
then, after three days, it was on to clemson, south carolina.
students at the center gathered—high school students, sac
graduates and staff for a retreat. we did writing workshops,
planned for both the immediate as well as the long term future,
were filmed at length for an upcoming feature on abc's good
morning america, and in general felt good about seeing and
embracing each other. we came from seven different states. only
one of our folk who was scheduled to come did not make it—keva's
flight was cancelled.
i won't go on at length about the sac get together, but i will
say that i am more angry than i have been a long, long time.
while we were meeting we got word (and downloaded a new orleans
article online) about the latest bad news coming from the new
orleans leadership. the orleans parish school board voted to
turn all of the public schools on the west bank into charter
schools. most of the schools on the east bank were flooded out.
the board had previously voted to make charter schools out of
two of the handful of east bank schools that were not flooded.
all of this follows the termination of all of the teachers.
effectively, they have killed public schools in new orleans.
period.
i don't know if my comment will make it onto television, but i
told the abc people: how much clearer can they make it that they
hate us. the mayor's proposes to open up casinos up and down the
major downtown and business district. the school board turns all
the west bank schools into charter schools.
they've already evacuated damn near all of the black people. why
don't they just shoot us and get it over with. and in case folk
don't understand, this is the future of 21st century urban
america. at this point the rebuilding of new orleans will not
take place over 40 or 50 years and it will not be accidental. it
will happen in 4 or 5 years and it will be planned. what the
fuck kind of major american city are you going to build without
a public school system?
my spirit says fight. not protest. fight. not draw up no list of
demands to a white power structure and their negro henchmen (the
school board is majority black), but fight. right now we are
planning for a "homecoming" in new orleans, november
11- 13, 2005. homecoming as in a school celebration. homecoming
as in a citywide bringing together of the people. we don't know
how big it's going to be. we don't know nothing right now except
we are going to have a homecoming, and even if they run us out
at gunpoint... let me stop. i'm starting to just spout off... we
will be in new orleans in november. we will have a homecoming...
we have other plans... we will fight back. we will resist. it
ain't over...
more in a minute...
a luta continua, kalamu posted 9 October 2005
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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 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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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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Negro Digest / Black World
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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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update 16 January 2012
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