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Books
by Afaa Michael Weaver
Water Song
(1985) / Multitudes (2000) /
Sandy Point (2000) /
The Ten Lights of God (2000) /
some days it's a slow walk to evening
These Hands I Know /
The Plum Flower Dance /
Multitudes /
Timber and Prayer /
Stations in a Dream /
The Ten Lights of God
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When Poets Grow in Factories
By Afaa
Michael Weaver
蔚雅風
My first experience
in a creative writing class was as a visitor.
Rodger Kamenetz, author of
The Missing Jew, allowed me
to sit in on his class. It was 1980, and he introduced
me to a number of poets, including Frank O’Hara.
I complained to
Rodger that I felt alienated from poetry as a factory
worker.
“Nonsense, Michael.
Your poetry is all around you.”
I thought he was
just being flippant. “I don’t know about that, Rodger.
Trucks and machines don’t seem very poetic to me.”
But I took his
advice and began writing about that world around me. An
earlier manuscript became my first book,
Water Song,
with poems like “Currents” and “The Aftermath,” a poem
which Gwen Brooks told me was a favorite of hers.
Immediacy was the
lesson, and I learned it from
Rodger Kamenetz. He was
teaching the creative writing class at Baltimore
Community College.
O’Hara’s aesthetic of personism and
his poem “The Day Lady Died” have been touchstones for
me in thinking of immediacy and the American lyric.
It might be hard to
imagine liquid dishwashing detergent as something dirty.
It seems to be the enemy of dirt. Even when you are too
lazy to scour a pot the way you should after you have
burned your frozen vegetables, you can take the charred
pot and soak it overnight with your detergent of choice.
As you sleep, the little bubbles pull out their
miniature scouring pads and get busy softening the dark
clumps of vegetable burned beyond recognition. Such a
powerful agent in a nice place like a kitchen should
never be thought of as dirty, but when you work in a
place making and packing the stuff, it seems foul beyond
redemption sometimes.
It was the early
years of the seventies, when polyester came into our
lives along with disco. I worked on packing floors at
Procter & Gamble’s Baltimore plant in
Locust Point, one
of the many points along Baltimore’s harbor. Directly
across from the plant on the other side of the harbor is
Fells Point, which is now a tourist hub, hardly the run
of the mill southern Baltimore neighborhood it was
during my childhood.
My packing floor
career had its high point when I became apprentice to
Smithers, an older, white coworker who hunted black bear
and had bear sandwiches for lunch sometimes. His wife
made the best fruit cake, and I always chose that when
he offered me cake or bear between the bread. Smithers
was a master paper cutter. He taught me how to use the
large iron paper cutter in the Ivory soap department to
precisely cut the small sheets that were the inner
covers for every bar of soap. We cut these sheets from
large slabs of paper that were so heavy we had to heave
them onto the iron table. One slip meant the corners of
the large sheets were irreparably misaligned and,
therefore, useless. We sat in the empty management
meeting room for breaks and for lunch, a room with large
clear windows where we could look out over the harbor
where the commercial ships passed long before the harbor
was remade for the tourists. Christmastime lunches were
the time for the dessert.
“Bear sandwich,
Mike.”
“No thanks, John,
but I’ll take a slice of fruit cake.”
“Here you go,
buddy.”
In the fall of
1974, after writing in fits and starts for a few years,
I was able to establish more of a consistent writing
mood. Writing while working in factories is a matter of
being able to maintain that meditation on your work
despite all the distractions around you. The danger is
that you become attached to adversity. It is only now,
twenty-four years after leaving factory life that I find
I want spaces in which to do nothing but write. Reading
was a violation of factory rules, as was writing. The
stated objective was our safety, which I believe. I
almost lost a hand on a packing unit. However, the
oppressive nature of factory life was such that it felt
more like the rules of the Gulag. In the latter
nineteenth century, as mass production developed,
industrial engineers applied the mechanistic
philosophy
of the Enlightenment to put forth the idea that
factories and factory workers should be perfect
machines, one the replica of the other.
It was not to be a
place to house developing poets, writers, and thinkers,
but there we were, many of us the wide eyed idealists of
the sixties who dropped out of universities to take work
among the masses, some of us following our own
interpretations of Marxist ideology. For me it was not
Marxism as much as it was the alienation I felt in a
predominantly white university. Whatever the reason for
our exodus, there we were in industrial life. In those
days, conversations among workers ranged the full
spectrum of intellectual inquiry. In 1973, I received my
first copy of the
Daodejing
from a factory
coworker.
If I wanted to be a
pompous egotist, I would say I set out to create the
canon of poetry of working class interiority as
resistance to the system. Although I had that as a “hazy
aesthetic,” the clearer view of things was given to me
by
Dr. Xiaojing Zhou, a scholar and critic of Asian
American literature at University of the Pacific.
“It seems that’s
what you’ve been doing all this time,” she said. We were
sitting in her office last spring, during my visit to
give a reading and talk to classes.
In the winter of
1974 to ’75, I began to assemble the original version of
Water Song, a manuscript I called Frenzy. Determined to
finish the bachelor’s degree I started six years earlier
at the University of Maryland, I enrolled at
Morgan
State University, but attending college and working on
the lines as a poet was too much for my fragile nervous
system. I finished the semester, but spent the last ten
years in the factory writing and reading on my own, with
mentoring from friends in academia and in the world of
writers at large, folks not imprisoned as I was at the
time, watching thousands and thousands of white, yellow,
and blue plastic bottles going around the conveyor
system to be filled with the immaculate soap and then
boxed to be sent on the long conveyor ride four blocks
up the street to the warehouse.
I can hear the
noise of the place now, as I write, although it has been
shut down and converted into a day care center for those
who can afford the luxury condos that sit on the edge of
what was once the warehouse parking lot.
The warehouse was
Freedom Land. It was where the plant’s misfits and
renegades worked. There was space to roam and hide. We
could stretch coffee and lunch breaks on evening and
night shifts.
The plant had an
internal job application system. Folks went from
department to department by applying for vacancies. In
the fall of 1975, I was able to get a position in the
warehouse as a truck loader. My manuscript was sitting
somewhere in
Toni Morrison’s pile at Random House, where
she was an editor. I had the utter audacity to send it
to her, and she kept it for almost a year. When she
returned it, she included a wonderful note saying she
very much wanted to place it but could not. That
rejection note was an inspiration, and I kept it for
many years before losing it in one of my moves from
place to place.
Things were busy in
the warehouse, but there was space, physical space that,
for me, translated into thinking space, into the
unfettering of consciousness. I was able to write more
consistently and began a free lance career as a
journalist, writing for the Baltimore
Sunpapers
mostly but also for the
Afro-American and the
City Paper of Baltimore. I started a small press,
and by the early eighties I was a part of Baltimore’s
literary renaissance.
We were poets, with
me emerging from the masses of bottles and trucks and
boxes, and more bottles and trucks and boxes, and
conveyors and machines . . . and oh my, the business of a
poet growing and living as African American working
class.
11 August
2009
Source:
EastBaltimoreMuse
posted 26 June 2010
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The Big
Boys / Industrial Me / When
Poets Grow in Factories
/ O Black and Unknown Bards
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Take This
Hammer
KQED's film unit
follows poet and activist
James Baldwin in the spring of
1963, as he's driven around San Francisco to meet with
members of the local African-American community. He is
escorted by Youth For Service's Executive Director
Orville Luster and intent on discovering: "The real
situation of negroes in the city, as opposed to the
image San Francisco would like to present." He declares:
"There is no moral distance ... between the facts of
life in San Francisco and the facts of life in
Birmingham. Someone's got to tell it like it is. And
that's where it's at." Includes frank exchanges with
local people on the street, meetings with community
leaders and extended point-of-view sequences shot from a
moving vehicle, featuring the Bayview and Western
Addition neighborhoods. Baldwin reflects on the racial
inequality that African-Americans are forced to confront
and at one point tries to lift the morale of a young man
by expressing his conviction that: "There will be a
negro president of this country but it will not be the
country that we are sitting in now." The TV Archive
would like to thank Darryl Cox for championing the
merits of this film and for his determination that it be
preserved and remastered for posterity.
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Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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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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If you like this page consider making a donation
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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
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 10 February 2012
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