The
Wondrous Wanda Coleman
Poems & Stories She Writes
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Bubble Eyes Declares War
this is the side I am forever on
arms were taken up
at Avalon & Manchester
on a school ground
two score & five years ago
i am still fighting
the absent horde
of fairer-skinned
mockers
who would not play
with me because i was too dark
who stole my
revengeful reports to God
& passed them around
& my writings caused
so much disruption &
hurt so many mean
little feelings that the
white teacher man
had to intercede
to quell the
violence, to dab away the angry tear
remove the fists
from hard-pressed head
then when, skirts
flying, they had returned
to 4-square and
double dutch
he took me aside
privately, stared at me
with those great
wide gray eyes
then laughed, said i
had quite a gift
to keep such papers
at home or face
the principal &
suspension & that some day,
if I had the
conviction & the courage
i'd give something great back to my people
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* * *
I Ain't Yo Earthmama (2)
pardon me, but you're standing on my stomach
those aren't
grapefruit you're squeezing
and certainly
not papayas
and niggahplease don't you dare speak of
coconuts
if you must
insist that this is a gold rush,
there are planes
hourly for South Africa & the Yukon
there's nothing
beneath this sternum but
blood vessels
rib bone & a significant muscular organ
which gives off no feelings unless
malfunctioning
and when
you get tired of
syphoning off my sweetwater
and pillaging my
salt lakes maybe we might discuss
conservation and recycling
until then
i suggest
adventure be omitted from the equation
this ain't the
jungle, jim
so quit stickin' your tarzan in my jane
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* * *
Cold Water Canyon
the splash of bone cold reality
over
me/sweet sun & shimmer
as B.B. King
ear-fucks Lucile/blues my medulla oblongata
everything
depends on me and everything is breaking
my butt. i
take that sidewinding high
drive the
honeysuckle aorta/make my way
down
mountainside/a lovely exotic twist
curve after
curve of brick red earth & lush green green
toward the tortured sky of home
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Holding the Sidewalk Down
after Shurli
it is an
american universal peculiar to certain black
men
who hang out on
street corners no matter where
making signal
to one another
some mysterious
juju/communication
worshipping the
passing of a life
that excludes
them
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Jill
I spotted her on her way into the
liquor store as I got into my car. I called, "Jill!"
She hunched her shoulders, turned slowly, then came
over. It had been twenty-odd years. She recognized
me but not my name. I was a sucker for the sob in
those tired, drab-olive eyes. The years had rode her
hard. She'd been the prettiest gal in our colored
junior high -- spun gold hair, gold skin and
go-light green eyes -- that beautiful mix of cree
indian and black made all the boys swoon. I wanted
to yakkitty-yak old home week, but was in a rush. I
insisted on her phone number and address. As she
wrote hastily, she explained her life as two
daughters and two failed marriages. I was busy
bleeding sentiment and thought nothing of it when
she hot me up for forty cents more on the price of a
half pint. I gave her a dollar and waved. When i got
home that night, I entertained the romance of
bopping by her crib with a short dog and jawing over
the world. I got out the note she'd written and
looked at it closely. The feeling had not been
mutual.
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Coleman's poems are an act of liberation, meant to be
experienced as something almost physical, like a punch or a
whipping . . . She wants her language to express anger, to
incite anger, and to shake all those who read it out of
their complacency.—The Nation
The poems and prose of Coleman's sixth book,
Hand Dance
, show a wry political awareness ("inside this poor person
is a rich one / struggling to come out"), a streetwise
knowledge of what it means to be black in urban American
("in the world I come from / violence is a language and a
bullet / sudden insight"), as well as a heady sensuality.— Black
Sparrow Press
Coleman is
best known for her "warrior voice." [But her] voice too can
weep elegiac, summoning memories of childhood's
neighborhoods her South L.A.'s wild-frond palms, the
smog-smear of pre-ecology consciousness. Her voice hits
notes as desperate as Billie Holiday's tours of sorrow's
more desolate stretches. But it can also land a wily punch
line as solid as that of a stand-up comic.—Lynell George, Los
Angeles Times
Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent.—The
Washington Post
Review of
Mecurochrome
"I am an outlaw, they assert./ there's
a ten-digit number stamped on my frontal lobe." This
sprawling eleventh collection of poems from the Los
Angeles-based Coleman finds her zig-zagging between
continuations of series begun in American Sonnets and the
1999 Lenore Marshall Prize-winning
Bathwater Wine, and grief-stricken
ruminations written out of her son's early death from
cancer.
Coleman, long a front-line voice in the
battle against America's seemingly endless supply of
institutionalized racism, sets her sights on store owners,
academicians, and the brands of social hypocrisy particular
to her home city: "the intellectuals are walking/ around
with Boy Scout knives/ buried in their brains/ while over
three hundred corpses a year/ are found rotting in Griffith
Park."
The six sections of the book are
sharply set off via subject matter, with the dream-shaped,
long-form meditations on consciousness in "A Kingdom of
Clouds" and the smoldering race-based critiques in
"Metaphysically Niggerish" especially strong. An eighty-one
page section of imitations and transliterations of poets
from Ammons to Zukofsky (using Mark Strand's anthology The
Contemporary American Poets as a source) serves as a
different kind of departure point, as Coleman creates
dialogs with mostly White poets through a close study and
recasting of their own lines: "The academy of the future has
closed doors. / It is unwilling books banned, curtains
drawn." (after John Ashbery) The book's length at times
dilutes the poetry's overall power, perhaps a by-product of
Black Sparrow's insistence on long manuscripts from its
authors, but this is a minor complaint.
In her mid-fifties, with a formidable
collection of work already behind her, Coleman's emotional
depth and battered, unwavering search for private and public
levels of justice continues to expand. (Aug.) Forecast:
Coleman has long published her novels (including
Mambo Hips and Make Believe) short stories
and many poetry collections with Santa Barbara-based Black
Sparrow. This book will be well reviewed in the small-press
community, and should generate larger-press interest in a
selected or collected.—Publishers
Weekly
Wanda Coleman's Critique of Maya Angelou
After four months of controversy, Los Angeles-based poet Wanda
Coleman, recipient of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
from the American Academy of Poets and a National Book Award
finalist last year, wryly concedes that she's received more
attention for one book review than for anything else she's
ever written. One bad review, that is, of Maya Angelou's
latest book,
A Song Flung Up to Heaven, the third
volume of an autobiography by "the Inaugural Poet."
In an April 14 book review in the Los
Angeles Times, Coleman concluded, "Unfortunately, the
Maya Angelou of
A Song Flung Up to Heaven seems small and
inauthentic, without ideas, wisdom or vision. Something is being
flung up to heaven all right, but it isn't a song." She
accused Angelou of writing a book full of "empty phrases
and sweeping generalities . . . dead metaphors ("sobbing
embrace," "my heart fell in my chest") and clumsy
similes ("like the sound of buffaloes running into each
other at rutting times"). The book has gotten some other
poor reviews, but it seems that Coleman caused trouble by
accusing Angelou of hustling the public, selling a skimpy book
in large type and large hype at a high price, containing
rehashed material and what may be exaggerated claims for a
high-minded, race-conscious past.
But a writer like Coleman, whose works have
titles that include
Mad Dog Black Lady,
Bathwater Wine,
and Berserk on Hollywood Blvd., can't be all bad. The
daughter of a ring-damaged boxer and a domestic who worked for
movie stars in Los Angeles, Coleman is a tough, combative writer
who has been described by poet Marilyn Hacker as someone who
"displays a verbal virtuosity and stylistic range that
explodes/expands the merely linear, the simply narrative, the
straightforwardly lyric, into a verbal mandala whose colors and
textures spin off the page." When Coleman says Angelou's
prose is loaded with inept metaphors, she knows what she's
talking about. Published by a small (now defunct) independent
publisher, Black Sparrow Press, and a star of the poetry slam
circuit, Coleman is someone who might be called an outlaw
critic, and very much the opposite of the public Angelou, a high
priestess of pomp and serenity.
The reassuring textures and nurturing tones
that rise in Angelou's voice rankle Coleman, representing a
facade that she equates with the author's success. "Maya
has obviously made her choice. If you come and you make even the
racists feel comfortable and you aren't asking for any
fundamental [social] change, you're going to get a fat
check," she told the Voice.
Coleman's review of
A Song was so
scathing that her editor at the L.A. Times Book Review
told her that the paper had received a lot of letters, running
pro and con, and she was disinvited to a book signing at Eso Won
Books, the leading African American bookstore in Los Angeles.
This shocked Coleman, and according to Eso Won co-owner James
Fugate, many locals. Indignant readers across the country went
listserv-crazy defending either Coleman or Eso Won.
"When the bookstore thing came
down," said Coleman, "I said, 'That's too cold,'
because Eso Won is a major center for black writers here."
Randy Ross of the International Black Writers Association (IBWA)
was organizing the Eso Won event to celebrate an anthology that
includes Coleman called
Griots Beneath the Baobab: Tales From
Los Angeles. Coleman said, "I suggested he ought to go
to the media. I contacted the PEN Center West, and Tim Rutten at
the L.A. Times picked up on it, then the Los Angeles
Sentinel." She wrote an account of the events in
Ishmael Reed's Konch magazine, and the episode got on
radio and TV, too.
. . .
Coleman said, "I don't think it's
negative to have a dialogue, as long as it's reasoned out. I
also think when a game is being run, that it should be pointed
out. We have a long history of running to each other's defense
but there are some things that are indefensible."
. . .
One reason for the controversy is simply that
the review was in the L.A. Times, and to be seen mainly
by whites. Black publications rarely print tough reviews, and
those who write them in mainstream publications will hear from
everyone involved. But most black publications are sensitive to
the fact that black readers are famously thin-skinned, and so
they rarely give any occasion to be deluged with e-mail.
. . .
Coleman has a similar beef with those
academics who are reluctant to examine the craft of writers like
Angelou. "I've been called into classrooms to say 'amen' to
her as a poet," she said. "I hate having to come in
and disillusion a classroom full of youth, and say, 'This is not
poetry, or at least it isn't good poetry.' You're called in
during Black History month, not to illuminate anything but
really to say 'amen' to whatever is going on at the moment.
Instead of archetypes, we're getting new stereotypes."
Source: Thulani Davis Slam Queen vs. Inaugural Poet.
VillageVoice.com / September 4 - September 10, 2002
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Wanda Coleman
was born and raised in a Los Angeles slum known as Watts famed
for its August 1965 Rebellion. Following this ethnic
insurrection she joined a teenpost and a number of organizations
set up to channel the "riotous" energies of young Black
Americans into constructive modes. A struggling welfare mother,
she was determined to become a writer in spite of horrific odds.
A brash, abrasive frank young woman, her few sponsorships were
frequently aborted by her naiveté, her stubbornness or
socio-economic contingencies. Yet, a writer she must be or "die
in the effort."
Initially
venturing into experimental theatre and dance, she backed into
scriptwriting when a teleplay scored her a nomination for the
NAACP Image Awards and she became the eighth minority member of
the Writers' Guild of America, West. Later there would be an
Emmy, but her romance with legendary Hollywood went the
legendary way of disappointment.
Subsequent stabs
at success bled literary fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation in poetry. She is
presently employed as a medical secretary/transcriber and
co-hosts "The Poetry Connexion," an interview program with
Austin Strauss for Southern California's Pacifica station.
Wanda Coleman is
the author of
Mad Dog Black Lady
(Black Sparrow, 1979),
Imagoes (Black
Sparrow, 1983) and
Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems & Stories 1968-1986.
A War of Eyes & Other Stories is her fourth book, though
first collection of fiction.
Source:
Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems & Stories 1968-1986.
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Maya Angelou: The Art of Fiction No. 119 (Fall 1990)
Interviewed
by George Plimpton
Maya
Angelou: The language of all the interpretations,
the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the
Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read
the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any
edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the
language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how
beautiful English is. Though I do manage to mumble
around in about seven or eight languages, English
remains the most beautiful of languages. It will do
anything.
George
Plimpton: Do you read it to get inspired to pick
up your own pen?
Maya
Angelou: For melody. For content also. I’m
working at trying to be a Christian and that’s
serious business. It’s like trying to be a good Jew,
a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a
good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a
good mother, a good buddy—it’s serious business.
It’s not something where you think, Oh, I’ve got it
done. I did it all day, hotdiggety. The truth is,
all day long you try to do it, try to be it, and
then in the evening if you’re honest and have a
little courage you look at yourself and say, Hmm. I
only blew it eighty-six times. Not bad. I’m trying
to be a Christian and the Bible helps me to remind
myself what I’m about. . . .
* *
* * *
Maya Angelou
I'm fine as wine in the summertime
"My connection
was with Hillary Clinton," she says. "I had watched
her when she was the first lady of Arkansas. I
thought this white girl would come to Arkansas and
play croquet on the lawn and throw tea parties. And
she was just the opposite. She worked on public
health and education… even prisons. When her husband
ran for the presidency and she said she was not
going to bake cookies, I thought, 'I'm going to
watch her for a while.'
"I told her
then: 'If you ever run for anything, I've got your
back. I'd never heard of Senator Obama. So when she
said she was running for president I said, 'I've got
your back.' "
When it became
clear that Hillary could not win, some Democratic
party grandees asked her to try to persuade Hillary
to step down. "I told them, 'I'm backing her. I'll
step down when she steps down.' When she stepped
down, I went over to President Obama."
She concedes
that she never thought America would put a black man
in the White House in her lifetime. "In 100 years'
time or maybe 50," she says. "But not now, no. I did
not believe it could happen now."
With hindsight,
how does she think it came about? "The terrorist
action of 9/11 gave birth to President Obama's entry
to the White House," she suggests. "Not directly but
indirectly." She launches into a lyrical riff on
Obama's campaign slogan, "Yes we can" which explains
that that feeling of boundless possibility
encompasses the best and worst of what the country
has to offer.
"Yes I can. I
can do whatever I want to do. I can do both the best
and worst I can imagine. I can own human beings. I
can have slaves. Yes I can. I can be the best human
being ever. I can defeat slavery and segregation.
Yes I can. I can be so cruel I can tax people out of
their homes. Yes I can. I can have the greatest
charities in the world. Yes I can."
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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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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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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
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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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