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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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when a man loves a
woman
Essay by
Kalamu ya Salaam
i don’t know
why i was immobile, just standing, caught between
moving forward and backing away from some horror
that was not my nightmare. i mean, why wasn’t i
doing something, why couldn’t i think of anything to
do besides be a voyeur, an onlooker, saying inside
my head: this is none of my business, yet, steady
gawking at the timeless tableau?
i didn’t see
him wind up, but i saw the fist smash. they were
half a block away. she cringed, or crumpled, or
slumped, or something, against the brick wall of the
white-painted old warehouse. too far away, i could
not hear anything. but from the way she staggered,
the hit must have been hard. no love tap. no heated
argument slap. but a fist. to the head, or maybe the
heart, the middle of her chest, between her breasts.
i don’t know. from where i was, i could not really
tell.
a moment
before, i had been at my desk. and someone, i forget
who, someone had rushed in and said a man was
beating a woman, outside. i remember there were at
least three of us, standing at the corner, just
beside the front door entrance to the black
collegian and edwards printing company. it was butch
and me, and i forget who the third person was,
probably bill, but i’m not sure. and by the time we
got there, what may have started as an argument on
the street, and probably included some cursing and
even perhaps a shove, or maybe he grabbed her and
she tried to jerk away, or could be she swung her
purse at him trying to back him back, or something.
i don’t know.
i don’t
remember exactly how old i was, but since i left the
magazine in 1983, i had to be in my early to
mid-thirties, old enough to know better. i had not
yet been to nicaragua, but by then had been to cuba
the first time, and haiti, and jamaica, and tanzania,
and china, and japan, and korea. i had been a lot of
places. seen a lot of things. stood with progressive
forces, even ventured into a few situations where to
be caught was possibly to be imprisoned, if not
straight up killed. some would say i had been
fearless. some might say bold. going gladly where
most folk feared to tread.
so why was i
not moving forward this time. why was i just
standing and looking. i told myself i did nothing
because it all happened so fast. like liston going
down in the first behind an ali punch most people
didn’t even see, the fight was over before i could
re-act. but i saw her body take the blow. and i did
nothing.
immediately
afterwards he looked like he said something to her.
and they walked away. together. away from us. down
the street. and the three of us went back inside.
well. the old street adage: don’t get in the middle
of lovers fighting cause you could end up getting
jumped by the both of them. or, the other old saw:
he might have a gun, she might have a razor (which
was reinforced by the fact that most of the men in
our office were gun owners, and lorraine, our first
secretary, carried a straight razor). and the
projects where those kind of people congregated was
one block down the street in the direction the
couple was headed. but i knew better, and besides, i
have faced down police and soldiers—a pistol or a
knife was nothing, comparatively speaking. no, the
truth was, i wasn’t afraid for my own safety, the
truth is, or was: i had been socially shaped not to
respond to violence against women, and i was simply
doing what i was trained to do: nothing!
trained by
movies and television that are not only forever
showing a woman being slapped, or smacked, battered
or bruised, but the media has made violence into an
acceptable form of entertainment, something we watch
and enjoy, watch and laugh, watch and take pleasure
in someone else’s pain.
seasoned by the
callous lassez-faire of street life that essentially
said: i don’t tell you what to do with yours, you
don’t tell me what to do with mine.
encouraged by
the army, especially in terms of all the shady
dealings that went down with the women we sexually
and economically abused with impunity—a lot of
people don’t know that the word hooker came from the
name given to the prostitutes employed by general
hooker during the civil war; oh, yes, i’m aware
general hooker didn’t directly pay the prostitutes
or even officially condone the sexual liaisons, but
that’s the american way. the leaders always have
maximum deniability even as the status quo works its
nefarious show.
conditioned by a culture that
said a fight between lovers was nobody’s business
but theirs.
assaulted by the literature—i
never forgot native son bigger bashing bessie with a
brick.
not to mention
pornography, the all-time top grosser among
americans, even in the state of utah which is
supposed to be so righteous. the violent sexual
exploitation of women and children, our number one
form of entertainment.
violence
against women was reinforced by damn near everything
i could think of. and the reinforcement was
incremental, no one thing guiding it all, but the
preponderance, the cumulative effect, like one rain
drop does not a storm make, but a multitude steady
falling will flood us out, wash us away, cast us
adrift, like i was, hesitant, unsure on that
sidewalk. where was mr. bold black man that day?
even though
violence was never practiced in the home where i
grew up, and even though it was unthinkable that i
would personally hit a woman, nevertheless, in ways,
until that day, i was not totally clear about, i
now realize that yes, i passively condoned such
violence, and if not condoned it at least tacitly
accepted men beating woman as the way it was with
some people, a sort of twisted status quo. and,
perhaps my passivity was birthed by an even more
sinister moral equivocation: it’s ok to be my
brother’s keeper, but that doesn’t include stopping
my brother from giving my sister a beating—oh, sure,
in the family, somebody you know, your mother,
sister, daughter, lover, auntee, oh sure then jump
in and break that shit up, but some sister on the
street we never seen before, i don’t know, you never
know what the deal be and ain’t no sense in getting
caught up in some edge of night drama.
protecting an
unknown sister—no matter what i said in the
abstract, when my face was pushed up in it in the
real world, her back against the wall, some huge
dude all up in her grill—i hesitated.
there had to be
some reason, some reasonable explanation for why i
simply stood there. it took me a while to realize
the main reason was that i live in a patriarchal
society, a society within which violence against
women is not only deeply embedded, but also a
society within which violence in general, and
violence against women in particular, is so broadly
accepted that it becomes invisible even though it is
ubiquitous. how can something so obvious be so
ignored?
the weight of
acculturation does not easily budge and can keep us
from moving forward even as we believe that it is
backwards to stand still.
afterwards, not
minutes, but in the days that followed, i said i
would never be silent again. that moment of
stillness turned me around. i would never be
uninvolved again. and truth be told, i haven’t, but
on the other hand, i have never been tested like
that again. never been within shouting distance of a
man beating on a woman.
yes, i have
stopped young people who got into inevitable fights
and tussles with each other. it really, really
saddens me that so much play-fighting is accepted as
a form of affection among many of our young people.
their seemingly harmless mock violence is
ameliorated by genuine affection or, more likely,
rather than by affection, by pubescent desire;
whatever, the result remains the same: in more cases
than not, what began as a seemingly harmless
activity actually ends up being a predictable
preparation for them accepting violence as part of
the package deal of personal relationships, thus
violence is fatally intertwined with what too often
passes for true love.
i can not
imagine any of my daughters or sons either accepting
or perpetrating abusive violence.
i have marched.
i have campaigned. i have written essays, plays,
poems, made movies. but ever since that day, i have
never been caught standing around simply looking
when a man beat on a woman. nor will i ever again
revert to letting aggressive violence go down
without at the very least shouting out against such
abuse, without doing something to stop the violence,
and if not bring that violence to a “squelching
halt” (to quote my father), at least intervening or
in some other effective way opposing and lessening
the negative effects of such violence.
cause when you
get right down to it, a true love of one has to also
be, to one degree or another, a love for all—and if
we can not love others, especially those whom we see
as the “other,” whether that be a gender other, an
ethnic other, a racial other, a sexual-orientation
other, whatever other, if we can not love an other
and yet claim to love a particular individual then
we are cutting off part of our own selves—the part
of our selves that is also a part of the other. we
are restricting our lives, constraining our souls,
diminishing our spirit, and this is especially true
when we are dealing with the questions of violence
against women.
when a man
loves a woman, truly loves a woman, he will not
silently condone nor, through his own inaction,
allow any man to do any woman wrong. because, while
there are those fortunate enough never to be
victimized by violence, in general there are no
exemptions: each woman in a society shares some of
the essence of every woman in that society. when a
man truly loves a woman, he must love all women or
not really love any woman at all.
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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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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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
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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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posted 29 April 2010
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