Can life exist without ideals
Can life exists without dreams
where does your soul go
when all you do is function
where does your spirit go
when all you do is function
Lately I have been thinking a lot about writing
a poem about class comfort
and color and privilege and guilt
about the social luxury of whiteness
about the social luxury of the white skin
a poem about the rules of the game
and I think back to the keeping it real conference
how we had the rhetoric to deconstruct performance
the performance of blackness and black identities
but we couldn't talk about black privilege
for fear of having to talk about black guilt
like the good doctor says we can't talk
about the fact that we like trashing on the weak
because we don't have the courage to confront the powerful
in this place
in this white power center
this bastion of liberalism
where ANTHROPOLOGY incubates racism
where anthropology INCUBATES racism
where anthropology incubates RACISM
this place of learning who the players are
what the rules of the game are
and how to play and win
How do you play knowing that at every moment in time your identity is in question
How do you win when at every moment in time your identity is in question
I'm criminal
compulsive alertness
always having to be alert
criminal
always ready to answer questions
that never get asked
because of assumptions
that lead to even more questions
‹All I need is a good defense
coz I'm feeling like a criminal›
How do you overturn four hundred years of history
in less than one century?
Since this is about why I can't wait
I am gonna tell you why I am so tired
why I'm so tired
of not being able to imagine a better world
so I can change my world so we can change the world
why can't we talk about the things that make you wanna
can't talk about the things that make you wanna holler
make me wanna scream
cry
yell
let my people go
let my people go
right here
right now
right here
let me go
how far will we go
when we're still in chains
I can't wait because I am tired
tired of smiling
tired of masking
I'm tired of signifyin'
tired of being on the front line
tired of fighting the same damned isms
daily
I am tired of wearing this suit of steel
I am tired of being weighed down by armor
I am tired of carrying a banner of love
while THE war
still rages
on
FUTURE
LAZARUS RISING: AN OPEN LETTER TO MY DAUGHTER by Myriam J. A. Chancy
Ma tres chere Aimee,
You have not yet even arrived and already I worry about what your life may be like, far from Haitian shores. I can already see it- the day you enter kindergarten, all frills and curls, bright-eyed, with some butterflies making your little stomach queasy: No one will know how to pronounce your name. Aimee, like the pan-Africanist Martinican writer Aime Cesaire, but named for love. Aimee: French for beloved. Will you know to tell your teachers and schoolmates how to pronounce it correctly? They will insist on transforming it into "Amy." Will you wince, misrecognize yourself, crawl into your infantile shell and reemerge as something closer to their expectations as I had done so many years ago only to return, at long last, to my own bright self, name and all? I must pause now and smile at the thought of how long you have been loved and awaited. You are bound to arrive in the next century, not so long from now. I want this letter to be a bridge for you, to people and events already come to pass that you will not have the opportunity to experience, but which are nonetheless yours to hold and have, a part of your heritage.
Our lives may intersect in two different planes, you in the flowering of a new life, me in the wilting of an aging one. I write you this, then, so you will know your mother before she was your mother, when she was young, full of life and dreams-dreaming still about the day you would be in her midst. I want to try and set down some details of what life has been like for me as a displaced Haitian woman, growing up in lands not my own, in places that have demanded my integration and assimilation, a betrayal of my Haitianness and the various heritages that make up that identity; I want you to know some of these things in case you must repeat those lessons and I am not there to speak to, or, in case I become (between now and the moment of your arrival) the kind of adult who no longer knows how to listen to the wisdom of children's voices, who no longer daydreams or draws boxes on scribbling paper with elephants inside, invisible to the naked eye. I write these things to you so that you may know and understand that you are not alone in the things you will experience. You will not be the first and you will certainly not be the last.
I want to begin, briefly, with the story of my family's movements back and forth between Port-au-Prince and North America. From the moment of my birth in 1970 until the age of five, the four of us shuttled back and forth from Haiti to Quebec. At one point, as my parents sought to establish themselves in North America, my brother and I, ages three and one respectively, lived either with an aunt or our grandmother for over a year's time. For this reason, I did not realize until we moved to English Canada in 1975 and I attended school there that we no longer lived permanently in Haiti. Prior to the age of five, after a few months on the continent, I had felt that we would return to Haiti and, eventually, we always did return. Haiti was home: There we were surrounded by family members of all ages. We went to school and had schoolmates. When we returned to Canada, it was the absence of the rest of our family, the smiling aunts and uncles, our grandparents, which weighed heavily upon my child's heart.
All of my childhood, even after the returns to Haiti came to an end at the age of eight, the memories of my birthplace remained the strongest. Those memories have molded my spirit, a certainty I have of what it means to be Haitian; of what it means to me to have been born in a place where I was welcomed by many open arms, into the bosom of a large family that has since become dispersed and fragmented; of what it means to be born in a place where, despite poverty, caste, and colorism, to be of African descent or mixed heritage, to know one's heritage is as important as knowing the names of your grandmothers, as important as remembering the source of your own naming.
Yes, Haiti continues to be afflicted by various problems-social, political, economic. Before the droughts that plagued Eastern Africa occurred in the mid-eighties and caused widespread famine, Haiti was categorized as the poorest country in the world. It is now the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It was also the first black republic in this hemisphere. Yet, while Haiti is often lauded for the triumph of the slave revolt that defeated Napoleon Bonaparte's troops and culminated in independence in 1804, her people are consistently denigrated and forced to endure economic blockades and racialized global trade practices that unduly penalize Haiti precisely because of its early triumph over European imperialism. Still, even diminished, we remain the same prideful people who kept our traditions well-enough alive to organize ourselves and successfully resist enslavement. Despite syncretism and outside influences, Africa remains in our veins as well as in the weathered features of our faces, rainbow hues, Arawak cheekbones, and all textures of hair known to man.