jazzy

i stumbled onto a jazz band rehearsing this evening in a cafe i support because it is independent and black owned and NOT the new starbucks on 118th and 8th ave. i walked in to buy a chai as i waited for some people who define the term colored people because the only time they know is cp.
i asked if i could sit because it looked like there was commotion and i was told there would be a rehearsal going on, if i didn't mind. so i sat and i pulled out my book, jazz by toni morrison (oh so appropriate, right?) and began to read while they hooked the mics and tuned the bass and adjusted the levels of sound. and then the singing began and the words on the page danced away and the book dropped to the table and my toes started tapping and my eyes closed and i started to smile and the vocalist said "cut" and tossed this line to me- "you are making my day right now you are so making my day."
for once my anal desire for punctuality from all people in my life was assuaged as i, in a new move, actually enjoyed waiting for a colored person. ;)

free jazz tomorrow night at 6 at tribal spears gallery and cafe, 117th and 8th avenue, harlem.
***

now, of course, i am reading and i am blogging and that means i am going to share an excerpt with you because this wouldn't really be me if i didn't.

I have stood in cane fields in the middle of the night when the sound of it rustling hid the slither of the snakes and I stood still waiting for him and not stirring a speck in case he was near and I would miss him, and damn the snakes my man was coming for me and who or what was going to keep me from him? Plenty times, plenty times I have carried the welts given me by a two-tone peckerwood because I was late in the field row the next morning. Plenty times, plenty, I chopped twice the wood that was needed into short logs and kindlin so as to make sure the crackers had enough and wouldn't go hollering for me when I was bound to meet my Joe Trace don't care what and do what you will or may he was my Joe Trace. Mine. I picked him out from all the others wasn't nobody like Joe he make anybody stand in cane in the middle of the night; make any woman dream about him in the daytime so hard she miss the rut and have to work hard to get the mules back on the track. Any woman, not just me. Maybe that is what she saw. Not the fifty-year-old man toting a sample case, but my Joe Trace, my Virginia Joe Trace who carried a light inside him, whose shoulders were razor sharp and who looked at me with two-color eyes and never saw anybody else...Is that why he let her scoop the melty part from around the edges of his pint of ice cream, stick her hand down in his salt-and-butter popcorn.
(p. 97, jazz)

kinda like the love song the jazz lady sang

a quickie

i have to have children so i can read ta-nehisi coates' the beautiful struggle to them as a bedtime story.

tnc is kind of amazing. i saw him read at mcnally robinson in soho tonight. tears flow to my eyes easily, especially in the presence of beautiful words, and the author's eloquence moved me tonight as only beautiful prose can.

get a copy.

unsafe passage

i'm rereading octavia butler's parable of the sower this week, and i've been telling my friends that it's hard to get through because the 2025 butler presents seems less and less farfetched every time i read about it.
there's an article in the times today that makes it that much more real. there are a number of high school children in chicago who are afraid to walk to school alone. this is probably not new news to people that know chicago, kind of like the random section in today's times article on KGIA acts like children bringing weapons to school or using racial slurs in the presence of teachers is a new thing. most of the sensation is a result of ignorance. but. children are afraid to walk to school for fear of being shot in the midst of a gang war. read parable of the sower and tell me what's different. tell me the world butler creates isn't possible, or maybe even likely.
these are troubled times.

i need to read more colson whitehead

i enjoyed his poke at margaret jones' memoir "love and consequences" in new york magazine this week. i ran across it on the train this morning, and being me, i of course did not understand it was a joke until i was way too far in. then i had a good 25 laughs in the last, like, quarter of the article. :) great! short excerpt, right around where i started to doubt the veracity of the piece:

Back in the states, when I recount my visit with Misha, I think I see something of the predator in Margaret, too. In the cruel intelligence of her gaze, her long silky mane. I ask her: Can Native Americans talk to wolves, or is that buffalo? At any rate, I think I can see that half of her heritage expressing itself as she listens. “Misha loves her wolves,” she tells me. “But fighting over squirrel carcass with her pack made her competitive, for reals. You write a memoir these days, and someone’s always trying to outdo you. It’s an arms race. Just when you outrun the tsunami, cradling a baby under each arm, you look back and some joker is surfing on that mother, with a whole bandolier of babies across her chest, and she’s juggling flaming torches and a chainsaw to boot. It’s mad crazy on these streets.”

ah, colson. so funny you are. "surfing on that mother, with a whole bandolier of babies..." i like you, are you single? ;)

anyway, then tonight as i browsed my google reader, i ran across this on postbourgie- he also wrote an op-ed in the times. yay!

readup!

maybe spring?

so last week was insanely busy in havestrength's world, and i'm woefully behind in terms of keeping up with the news of the day. the weather is also getting warmer, and that alone makes it harder to spend evenings/afternoons/mornings in front of my computer browsing google reader rather than out and about, sitting/walking/laughing/eating in the sunshine. i have a feeling that as weather improves my current event-tracking is going to become quite feeble. i will have to depend on some of my more informed friends to keep me on track. :)

a few things that i've found out there in the world, though, that may be of interest:

• alice walker on obama @ the root
• an old post of mine, consisting of one of my favorite love poems, "salt" by lucille clifton
• great post @ afrobella on the benefits of the "pre-poo." i used oyin handmade's whipped pudding and some olive oil on saturday, with great results!
• aichlee over at brave star is doing wonderful things with videoblogging and women's poetry. check her out.
• the posts (cord's and lauren's) on blackness at stereohyped are pretty smart. read up! and then if you're in nyc come to the theorizing blackness conference on friday. i'll be there, playing hooky from work, because theorizing blackness is totally worth a vacation day?
  
• lastly, will smith's kids are too fucking adorable. damn.
  

because i am a reader,

i spend money on subscriptions to literary journals. go figure.

i received my first issue of callaloo today, and i am ultra ready to read. ultra. ready. i may have to go to the park (ultimate reading venue) for this one.

the women's history month blog carnival has got me going

it's happening (at least partly) over at what tami said. today's carnival post got me, so i thought i'd share it here. it's by christina springer:

rambles on rage

1.

i hope
the rage turns

into a cherry blossom, so
I can brew

wine from sunset ripened fruit

2.

obama, with great delicacy and care
i put my white liberal friends in the dark

drawer of hurt where i won' t see them
again for 15 years. maybe when you have

more than 152 pieces of passed legislation
to her 20, or mice nibble the experience

of your fluffy words
into a victory confetti.

i'll feel safe. see desperate
lives bouncing "Yes, we can!"

3.

little girl inside
screams
"fair! just

want every
simple thing
fair!" just

hear.

4.

why do faces that I love
hate my salvation?

doves of broken handlers
crack aspiration.

sugar smart smile, divine be
gentle and calm all of me.

rage and rage and rage
'til loved ones can not see

how oozing hapless happy
froth consumes identity.

5.

the equation for soul height +
vision size divided by spin control

seems weighted, specialized.
give me your equation for my destiny?

blogs about me?

hmmm.

double hmmm.

latoya over at racialicious did some numbers on herself to figure out how she shapes up based on all of these "identity" sites. i kinda want to, but as you all know, i already have issues with my blackness. ;)

check it allllllll out.

as usual, i'm late on this

can you believe this?! and what happens when the money gets old? or the lazy kids start kicking the smart kids' asses for their money instead of earning it themselves?

um, mr. klein? mr. fryer? when was the last time you actually went to a struggling middle school and observed behavior? and when was the last 30 bucks impressed a kid that would rather be out on the streets selling weed? and how do you think this incentive money will be spent? buying new notebooks?

i want to start my own school really, really badly until i read things like this...

***

on a slightly different note, whoa. $125,000?

conscious women rock the page!

that's the name of the curriculum i've been spending so much time on for the last few months! we are winding down the production process, and the curriculum is going to come out in march.

---
2008 ~ Year of the Hip-Hop Woman!

Coming March '08
Conscious Women Rock the Page:
Using Hip-Hop Fiction to Incite Social Change
A one-of-a-kind curriculum

by: JLove, Black Artemis, E-Fierce and Marcella Runell Hall
---

check out the writers' websites for more information on their work. they are an incredible group of women doing good things for the world!

i think i'm going to have to do this better justice tomorrow

but tonight i'm going to share with you some of these unformed thoughts that i've scribbled in the margins of this week's new york magazine article on hillary and barack. i saw chimamanda adichie again tonight, and spoke to her (somewhat gushing- and embarrassingly), and i thought i'd be able to focus on something else on the way home but i just couldn't. tomorrow i swear i am going to make this better (and actually coherent), but for now, a few key points...

an open letter to cnadichie:

dear chimamanda,

• the way you graciously ignored my insanity tonight was truly touching. i know i kinda-sorta had tears in my eyes when i tapped you on the shoulder and babbled incomprehensible nonsense about your writing, and that those tear-filled eyes widened perceptibly when you asked my name and complimented my hair, and that all of those things combined must have struck fear into your heart. but this gift you have, this gift of words, is amazing to me. i envy it. and i'm so glad that it is yours, because i think you use it with a wisdom that eludes many in this world to whom is given much power.
• "my american jon," like half of a yellow sun and purple hibiscus before it, scares me because your sentences are my thoughts, my feelings, my heart on paper, expressed more eloquently that i ever could. between you and zadie smith i feel like my deepest feelings, the good, the bad and the ugly, have finally been expressed and restored to me and all of the beautiful women out there like me the power that has been stripped from us by the myriad negative forces out there in our world. you speak back! and your speech is all that i need it to be, and more.
• finally i have to say that i will be back tomorrow to try and make this sound less crazy and more casually admiring. you know, just in case you happen to google yourself tonight and find this. because i know if i were you i'd be googling myself constantly.
  

book learnin'

had my kick-off session of an Inquiry to Action Group (ItAG) with the New York Collective of Radical Educators tonight. i am SO READY to get my brain in gear and engage with other like-minded kid-lovers. so ready to learn and stretch my mind, to stretch my expectations, and to stretch my understandings of myself. ready to make new friends and new connections.

for monday:
freire's letter to north american educators,
chris vine's interview with augusto boals,
and donaldo macedo's intro to "pedagogy of the oppressed"

it doesn't get much better than this.

what i'm doing at work today

working on my book wishlist for the new year. here's a taste:

1. the best american nonrequired reading, 2007. (ed. by eggers)
2. the book of other people (ed. by ZADIE!)
3. ake: the years of childhood (soyinka)
4. but some of us are brave (ed. by hull)
5. a poem traveled down my arm (walker)
6. in search of our mother's gardens (walker)
7. scattered hegemonies: postmodernity and transnational feminist practice (ed. by grewal and kaplan)
8. decentering the center: philosophy for a multicultural, postcolonial, and feminist world (ed. by narayan and harding)
9. feminism without borders: decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity (mohanty)
10. third world women and the politics of feminism (mohanty)
11. wizard of the crow (Wa'Thiong'O)
    

a heartbreaking work of staggering genius

a few thoughts on tonight's reading at the 92nd st. y:

1. chimamanda ngozi adichie is as beautiful as she is talented as she is well-spoken as she is thoughtful. all around admirable soul. when norman rush asked her about the "african village" in "the african novel," she told him that the words of the question were meaningless, and she therefore had no answer. when he asked her how she felt about dave eggers, as a white man, writing the story of a black african one, she said that when she first read the book she was annoyed with herself for liking it as much as she did (ummm, can i get an amen?), and that in the end the worth of a novel lies in how the story is told, not who is telling it. in sum, she was WONDERFUL.
2. dave eggers was a bit of a bumbler, which i guess at the end of the day isn't really that much of a surprise. but he's humbler than i thought he would be too, and more thoughtful. and he called rush on the "africa" versus a specific african country commentary on more than one occasion. gotta love that.
3. quote from tonight's discussion that makes me want to go back and read "half of a yellow sun" all over again: "this is not my story to tell."

if you're wondering to whose novel the title refers, i'll say that dave eggers is more brilliant than i thought in coming up with that phrase. he and chimamanda both have something that makes me stagger, just a little bit.

the only words that i really loved from rush's mouth tonight:

"both novels stand for memory and knowing the truth."

there are just some things that are worth reading.
**

in other news, the talk with the boss went better than expected today. not wonderfully, mind you, but i think she heard me and the message that lurked behind my words. i cannot be tethered to my chair at work. i will not be there until 7:30 or 8:00 at night when i can have a life outside of that office. i want to live, and living at work doesn't do that.

i know that as a twenty-something i have to pay my dues. i know that. even if i knew what i wanted, i'm not necessarily empowered to make "that" happen. but i do think i have the right to feel like my hard work is taking me somewhere, and that's just not the feeling i get at my current job. it feels like a lot of hard work for nothing. and that's not how i want to feel/what i want to be.

my boss told me that sometimes what is needed is time. i told her that i don't have the kind of time she's looking for. and i told her i need alternate ways to make money this summer that are going to make my time of the absolute essence. the next few months are going to kick my butt.
***
a little additional reading:
c.n.a. in the morning news, oct. 2006
"half of a yellow sun" as a short story in literary potpourri
uzodinma iweala, my favorite young black author whom i've actually met on more than one occasion, and with whom it might be said i've had a conversation, in the morning news, march 2006.