Thursday, November 9, 2023

Shades of Anger - Poem about Palestine

My Homeland


Ibrahim Tuqan – My Homeland

My homeland
My homeland
Glory and beauty
Sublimity and prettiness
Are in your hills
Life and deliverance
Pleasure and hope
Are in your atmosphere
Will I see you?
Safe and comfortable

Sound and honored
Will I see you?
In your eminence
Reaching the stars
My homeland
My homeland
*

The youth will not get tired
Their goal is your independence

Or they die
We will drink from death
But we will not be slaves to our enemies
We do not want
An eternal humiliation
Nor a miserable life
We do not want
But we will return
Our great glory
My homeland
My homeland

*
The sword and the pen
Are our symbols
Not talking nor quarreling
Our glory and covenant
And a duty to fulfill it
Shake us
Our honor
Is an honorable cause
A raised flag
O, your beauty
In your eminence
Victorious over your enemies
My homeland
My homeland




As mentioned above, Ibrahim is Fadwa’s brother who initially introduced her to poetry and literature. Born and raised to a prominent governing family in Nablus in 1905, his works are believed to have influenced generations and echoed the very silenced Palestinian voices at the turn of the 20th century. 

My Homeland seems to serve as both a tribute and reminder of how resilient Palestinians are,  bearing and carrying “the sword and the pen (as) (their) symbols” at all times – proof that the Palestinian cause will only die out once each and every single pen runs out of ink.


Enough for Me

 Fadwa Tuqan – Enough for Me

Enough for Me
Enough for me to die on her earth
be buried in her
to melt and vanish into her soil
then sprout forth as a flower
played with by a child from my country.
Enough for me to remain
in my country’s embrace
to be in her close as a handful of dust
a sprig of grass
a flower.

Considered one of the most distinguished contemporary Arab poets, Fadwa Tuqan’s works have been met with great international success and awards. Born in 1917, she has witnessed her homeland sweep from British rule to leave room for the creation of an Israeli state and a Palestinian authority within decades – an experience

that she made sure to pen down. Her introduction to poetry was made through her brother who is no other than the illustrious Ibrahim Tuqan, another Palestinian nationalist poet whose work is believed to have rallied Arabs during their revolt against the British mandate.

In this poem, Fadwa attempts to shed light, through a handful of verses, on her roots and how home will always be home no matter what. Titled Enough for Me, it seems as if the author wants us to know that no matter what could happen to her homeland it will always be hers and no one will be able to take that away from her. 

Wednesday, November 8, 2023

Ta-Nehisi Coates Speaks Out Against Israel's "Segregationist Apartheid R...

Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks the truth about Israel and the United States of America and what they are doing to the Palestinian people.

Saturday, December 4, 2021

Isn't It a Pity

There are plenty of places to start exploring Nina Simone’s music, from the songs that have worked their way into our cultural fabric through soundtracks and TV commercials to the more challenging music she made as she evolved musically, personally, and politically. One thing we’d beg you to check out on the way is her epic expansion of George Harrison’s “Isn’t It A Pity.”                                                                                                            Isn't it a pity  

                                                          Isn't it a pity 
You don't know what I'm talking about yet
 But I will tell you soon
 It's a pity
 Isn't it a pity
 Isn't it a shame
 Yes, how we break each other's hearts And cause each other pain

 How we take each other's love
 Without thinking anymore
 Forgetting to give back
 Forgetting to remember
 Just forgetting and no thank you
 
Isn't it a pity
 Some things take so long
 But how do I explain
 Why not too many people can see
 That we are all just the same
 We're all guilty

 Because of all the tears
 Our eyes just can't hope to see
 But I don't think it's applicable to me
 The beauty that surrounds them
 Child isn't it a pity
 How we break each other's hearts
 And cause each other pain
 How we take each other's love The most precious thing

 Without thinking anymore
 Forgetting to give back 
Forgetting to keep open our door
 Isn't it a pity Isn't it a pity
 Some things take so long 
But how do I explain

 Isn't it a pity 
Why not too many people
 Can see we're all the same
 Because we cry so much
 Our eyes can't, can't hope to see 
That's not quite true 
The beauty that surrounds them

 Maybe that's why we cry God, isn't it a pity
 Lord knows it's a pity
 Mankind has been so programmed
 That they don't care about nothin'
 That has to do with care C-a-r-e
 How we take each other's love The most precious thing
 Without thinking anymore
 Forgetting to give back
 Forgetting to keep open the door

 But I understand some things take so long
 But how do I explain
 Why not too many people Can see we're just the same
 And because of all their tears
 Their eyes can't hope to see 
The beauty that surrounds them
 God, isn't it a pity 
The beauty that surrounds them
 It's a pity We take each other's love
 Just take it for granted Without thinking anymore

 We give each other pain And we shut every door
 We take each other's minds 
And we're capable of taking each other's souls
 We do it every day Just to reach some financial goal
 Lord, isn't it a pity, my God
 Isn't it a pity, my God
 And so unnecessary
 Just a little time, a little care A little note was written in the air
 
Just the little thank you,
 We just forget to give back 
Cause we're moving too fast Moving too fast
 Forgetting to give back But some things take so long
 And I cannot explain 
The beauty that surrounds us
 And we don't see it We think things are just the same

 We've been programmed that way
 Isn't it a pity
 If you want to feel sorry Isn't it a pity
 Isn't it a pity
 The beauty sets the beauty that surrounds us 
Because of all our tears
 Our eyes can't hope to see

 Maybe one day at least
 I'll see me And just concentrate on givin',
 givin', givin', givin' 
And till that day
 Mankind doesn't stand a chance 
Don't know nothin' about romance
 Everything is plastic Isn't it a pity My God.

 Harrison wrote the song about the breakup of the Beatles, but Simone moves it somewhere more personal in terms of her own struggles and more global in terms of the civil rights movement and the disillusionment that followed. She makes critical changes to the lyrics — sometimes as simple as changing a pronoun, sometimes profound as adding entire lines that call the motives, morality, and future of all mankind into question — and with little more than her voice and piano, turns a rock song into an expansive mix of all the music she knows, from Bach to the blues to gospel to jazz. She sings she cries, she preaches. And she plays her ass off. It’s a performance as complex and beautiful and challenging as Miss Simone herself.

 

Thursday, July 2, 2020

Caroline Randall William - My Body Is a Confederate Monument



                          Caroline Randall William

Vanderbilt Uni.Writer-in-Residence Caroline Randall Williams’ article, “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument”, This was published in The New York Times. June 26,2020

Caroline Randall Williams, MFA, is MHS’s newly appointed Writer-In-Residence. Named by Southern Living as “One of the 50 People changing the South,” the Cave Canem fellow has been published and featured in multiple journals, essay collections and news outlets, including The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, CherryBombe, and the New York Times. As a poet, essayist and cookbook author, she works to create texts and raise questions that examine how the lived-in body both inspires and becomes its own text in the world. From blues poetry to the reexamination of soul food in the name of social justice, her multi-genre writing practice invites students both on and off the MHS track to explore ways to analyze the body and the human condition outside of the context of making a diagnosis, and to claim agency in how we shape and articulate our physical and emotional narratives.

Caroline Randall Williams a past Writer-in-Residence at Fisk University and the acclaimed author of Soul Food Love, Lucy Negro Redux, and The Diary of B.B. Bright: Possible Princess.

Caroline is an author, poet, and academic whose 2015 book “Lucy Negro, Redux” was re-released in 2019 by Third Man Books and adapted into a ballet. In addition to her books of poetry, Caroline also co-wrote a cookbook with her mother, author Alice Randall, in 2015 called “Soul Food Love.” That book received the NAACP Image Award in Literature and led Southern Living to call her one of the “50 people changing the south.”

Williams, a native of Nashville, Tennessee, is a graduate of Harvard University, class of 2010. After graduation, she spent two years as an instructor in the Teach for America program. She received the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing from the University of Mississippi in 2015. She is the great granddaughter of Arna Bontemps, the African-American poet, novelist and noted member of the Harlem Renaissance,and the granddaughter of Avon Williams, the Nashville lawyer and key leader of the city's civil rights movement. In January 2015, she was named by Southern Living magazine as one of the "50 People Changing the South in 2015." In 2015, she joined the faculty of West Virginia University as an assistant professor. In 2016 she was appointed Writer-In-Residence at Fisk University. In the Fall of 2019, she joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University. as the Writer-In-Residence of Medicine, Health, and Society;
                My Body Is a Confederate Monument

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.
  — I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.

This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.

But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.

Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.

Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.


https://local.cltampa.com/event/ellas-americana-folk-art-cafe/awp-reading-rock-show-dance-party-wjacuzzi-boys
http://www.tedxnashville.com/upcoming-events/tedxnashville-2020/tedxnashville-2020-speakers/caroline-randall-williams/
http://thackermountain.com/home/caroline-randall-williams-2/
http://www.sewanee.edu/academics/english/news/new-course-for-easter-2019-writing-the-blues.php
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/opinion/confederate-monuments-racism.html
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/mhs/2020/06/williams-my-body-confederate-monument/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Randall_Williams

Thursday, March 26, 2020

DEACON OTIS WICKNINE sings "Don't Let The Corona Get On Ya"





Thank you Stephanie Hill for this great find!  Much Love and Good Health to YOU and all of your family -- as I bless mine with this fantastic musical rendition!!!   [And where is a SMILEY FACE when you need one?????]

Monday, March 16, 2020

Coronavirus Impacts Tom Hanks, the NBA and Monkeys in Thailand | The Dai...





How does this man from African  get to pick up the Black idiom and situational familial experessions so accurately?  I mean, this guy is seriously gifted in abundant ways.  Anyway, I really like his style and you should too,  I think he's kind of amazing in his own right.

Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Maya Moore on Justice for Jonathan Irons | Amanpour and Company





This story is a scathing indictment of the USA justice system.  It is actually representative of a modern-day slavery scheme to falsely and callously imprison young Black men possibly to fulfill a monetary social gain to keep the prisons full and destroy the lives of young Black men regardless of any rationale for true justice

Sunday, February 23, 2020

2017 National Poetry Slam



                                   2017 National Poetry Slam 

 
    2017 NPS Finals - Brooklyn Slam -Crystal Valentine, Roya Marsh, Paul Tran, and Chris Lilley

Crystal Valentine, Roya Marsh, Paul Tran, and Chris Lilley of Brooklyn Slam performing an original poem at the 2017 National Poetry Slam Finals at Paramount Theatre in Denver, Colorado.

             2017 NPS Finals - Dominique Christina "Mothers of Murdered Sons"

Dominique Christina performing an original poem at the 2017 National Poetry Slam Finals at Paramount Theatre in Denver, Colorado.

                                                      2017 NPS Finals - dada slam

dada slam, winners of the Group Piece Finals at the 2017 National Poetry Slam, performing an original poem at the Paramount Theatre in Denver, Colorado

    2017 NPS Finals - San Diego Poetry Slam - "America" Javon Johnson, Natasha Hooper, & Rudy Francisco

Javon Johnson, Natasha Hooper, and Rudy Francisco of San Diego Poetry Slam performing an original poem at the Paramount Theatre in Denver, Colorado.

                            2017 NPS Finals - Da Poetry Lounge "Whoopings"

Kito Fortune, Poetic Moment, Alyesha Wise of Da Poetry Lounge slam team performing an original poem at the Paramount Theatre in Denver, Colorado.

                                2017 National Poetry Slam - Brooklyn Slam

Paul Tran, Roya Marsh, Crystal Valentine, and Chris Lilley of Brooklyn slam team performing an original poem at the Paramount Theatre in Denver, Colorado.

                     2017 NPS Finals - House Slam - Angelica Maria Aguilera

Angelica Maria Aguilera with Boston's House Slam performing an original poem at the 2017 National Poetry Slam Finals at Paramount Theatre in Denver, Colorado.




Monday, February 3, 2020

Abena Koomson performs "Let America Be America Again" by Langston Hughes

Poets in Unexpected Places pop up at the holiday market in Union Square with poems in response to police brutality, a day after the non -indictment for the killing of Eric Garner.

Thursday, August 15, 2019

"Dear America" by Jose Bello

Two days after he read this poem at a TRUTH Act forum in Bakersfield, California, ICE arrested Jose Bello. We sued. ICE cannot intimidate us into silence. Visit facebook.com/FreeJoseBello for updates.