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Responses
Kam: Rudy,
Nice poem.
. . . Thanks.
Jeannette:
I like this, especially "going home where no home
is."
Miriam: Rudy, thanks for the
dedication—my lord, a
poem for me, quite an honor. It's interesting the way that
you've incorporated my words into the poem, but I believe you're
taking a shot (yet again—smile) at my emphasis on the quotidian
at the expense, you suggest, of the really important:
poverty, corruption, classism, etc. But maybe (yet again)
I personalize too much. The girls (K., Sandra, Jeannette,
others, and I) talk about this a lot—how we women have to hold
up the sky. And I do, indeed, think it's a gender thing,
though I hate like hell to sound sexist. I truly believe
that women have to lead more balanced, more grounded lives,
because we have to tend to the everyday realities.
Well,
maybe I should only speak for myself. I am very, very much
concerned about rape, violence, war, corruption, classism,
homophobia—all the horrors with which we have to contend--but
each day that I get up I have to take care of somebody:
ease the dying, help my sick mother, search for my lost child,
pay my grandson's tuition, take food to a friend with lung
cancer, help the daughter who fell down the steps last week.
Then, somehow, through it all, try to DO something about the big
issues and, still, find time to write and be productive and
creative and make my life mean something in the short time that
I'm here on this earth. Don't you understand that?
Your grandmother, whose letters I read with such interest, held
up the sky for you. As I've explained, the really critical
question for me is "Did s/he love enough?" Yes,
your grandmother loved enough.
K. asked, in response to my piece about Rosa Parks, "Does
feminism preclude your enjoyment of motherhood and the strengths
garnered from nurturing another life . . . then seeing that life
develop into adulthood?" Absolutely not! Being
a mother and a wife and a professor and a lover and a scholar
and an activist are part and parcel of who I am as a woman and a
feminist. Yet, whenever I share some of the bits &
pieces of my life—my struggle through graduate school with
four small children, for example—you guys never give me any
credit. You suggest, sort of elliptically, that my views
are too personal, too individual, too middle-class. Or did
I misread your poem? Love and peace,
Rudy: "Ode to Bowling Balls," it's not
either/or. It's both/and. I was just trying to write a poem. I
love you as you are. But I must be me also. That's not an
indictment of you. Women must do what they have to do, of
whatever class to hold family and support their needs and
endeavors. Classism is not an issue in this poem. Did you know
in Iraq and Palestine it’s the most educated, skilled, and
talented women who blow themselves up to shame their men into
action? Special virtues don't just reside in the poor, who may
be often their worst enemies.
By the way I too was raised in a world that
women (Mama) felt that a woman had her duties and a man had his
duties. That which was in the house was her province. Outdoors
he had his say. We would not have had all the life we had
without Mama. But Daddy was not Mama. We needed both, we a
product of both.
Maybe he was impractical. He died people
owing him money. Anti-clerical, he was a man concerned with the
ethics of religious life, of that which was beyond the comforts
of life. Okay, call it manhood, call it peoplehood, call it
freedom, call it the Spirit that strives to free itself from the
body that restrains it. They struggled like titans--the personal
and the political. Did they love each other? They defined love
different than what we find in romance novels. Though family
still live in a house he built, long after his death, many felt
freed from an oppressive regime.
It was mostly his antiquated irrationality
that was recalled by the women, the storytellers of the family.
And, of course, I had my criticisms. As a child, he was brutal,
a son of a slave. Today, when I measure myself against what he
accomplished I find myself a small fellow when it comes to
holding together a
family against rapacious forces. he did it with five
daughters during the Great depression when they were paying 25
cents a day.
It's not always that
we see the other in our mirror. He
said when I go out into the world I'd find out what he tells me
the world is. Of course, it was not either/or.
I found his truth but I could not respond
to it as he, make his sacrifices, only my own. As I grow older I
love him even the more, though when he died I held a grudge, maybe
that's what insufficient love is. Now, in my own way, I have become him.
Truly,
I meant no offense in using your words. They just happen to work
in a poem I was trying to write. I was watching a Burns film on
the decimation of Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph,
those of the Ghost Dance, Wounded Knee, and an Indian today speaking of how
he deals with these memories. And then your words, a capsule of
black life, in response to Ariel Sharon's starting a new
party—that he has some balls, unlike some of our own black
leaders. It all got mixed up.
I am your admirer. Your sentiments and
others are mine that I struggle with each day, not because
they are not real and true but there is always so much more, and
that there has to be more, and I want that which is more, too.
Both be the same universe. The poem if anything mirrors
this internal struggle when times worsen.
Oh, by the way, I took a few liberties and posted
a promo of Homespun
Images
Miriam: We're on the same page, Rudy.
No, it's not either/or; it's ying and yang, male and female,
individual and collective, personal and public. But the
elements exist in a precarious balance, and each of us must find
the percentage of both/and that is right for us.
When I'm dialoguing with my male friends, I
have to keep the woman thing, the gender thing, up front because
so often when we debate about race and class, the female element
is subsumed, swept under the rug, as it were. I was happy
that, in posting my comments, you pointed the reader to the four
powerful and empathetic articles that Kalamu wrote about women.
He is definitely a do-right, think-sane brother, as are you.
I did not know that the most educated and
talented women in Iraq & Palestine are the ones
who blow themselves up and that they do so to shame their
husbands. Are you sure about that? I haven't read that
anywhere. In one of the recent bombings, for example, it was
the husband apparently who persuaded his wife to join the group,
but her bomb didn't detonate.
The strict separation of duties according to
gender—that outside/inside division—that your parents followed
has been substantially relaxed by successive generations.
From all that you've said about them in various narratives, I have
the impression that, as the children of slaves, they were
traditional, old-fashioned, stern disciplinarians, who probably
carried a stick and knew how to use it.
My mother describes my great grandparents,
former slaves, in the same way. Though you may chafe at that
impracticality, irrationality, and even brutality, it produced a
fine son with solid values—YOU. Those of us who are your
friends certainly do not see you as a "small fellow."
You have accomplished so much more than he ever dreamed of, and,
were he alive today, I know that he would be very proud of you and
of your achievements, especially your acts of kindness and
generosity. No, I don't think you are like him, but you have
just learned to understand him better and, therefore, to love him
more.
When I speak of love, as in "Did s/he love
enough?", I am not talking about romantic love either.
I am speaking of the capacity that an individual has to love
another, be it one's child, parent, spouse, or friend. I suspect
that your parents did not love each other in the way that we think
of the term today. (By the way, (and you don't have to
answer this if you don't want to) is your birth mother still
living? Did you know your birth father? Do you have
any kind of relationship with your siblings? You mentioned
living with your mother & siblings when you first came to
Baltimore).
I saw the same Burns film about the decimation
of the Native Americans several years ago. Isn't it a part
of a whole series on the building of the West, in which each
segment deals with a different ethnic group? What the
Europeans did and are still doing to the Native Americans is
criminal.
Your "Bowling Ball" poem is strong.
I'll write about it later.
"I own you as my son. No grand
Son."
Rudy, I just finished reading (in part) your Introduction
to your mother's letters and then a few more of the letters.
Both are very very moving, especially the reason that you give for
preserving and posting the letters—so that your family and that
holy ground will never be forgotten. I understand so well
how your mother felt because that's the way that I feel about my
grandson Gregory.
He's my son. I took him in my arms when
he came out of his mother's body, brought him home with me, nursed
him through all his illnesses, rescued him when his drunken father
ran his mother out of the house with a shotgun, paid his way
through college, and talked to him often about life & love.
On Dec. 16th, I'll go to Knoxville to see him
graduate from college. My baby!
posted 2 December 2005 |
