My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter

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My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter Page 9

by Aja Monet


  where magic was wise and slaves unchained.

  i uncover the lantern of living in eyes and the world is unafraid.

  eye contact as portals between then and forever.

  a creature crouches in the cry, a canvas in the iris, a pillow

  where the looking lay

  as we rinse the silence from all our sisters.

  yesterday

  i was an explorer

  but tomorrow

  tomorrow

  i am the shore,

  meeting the sand with every tide

  the sea returns to me

  i am forever in debt to the way of rinsing

  how water litters the land,

  nothing belongs to me

  i merely am

  today

  tomorrow

  yesterday

  time

  time is a fleeting fool

  who dares own that which you are, the air?

  have you a chain to hold us?

  the world cannot contain our ways.

  yesterday i was a poet

  but tomorrow i am an emcee

  a seagull of secondhand verses

  writing with rhythms and reasons

  still a river

  i flow

  tomorrow

  name me legit

  i am the earth

  babbling to itself, the beat, an eardrum.

  i leak music and lay with light.

  i was a voice repeating the sound

  of everything there ever was.

  i am everything there ever was.

  the first spoken word

  the groove the toes tap to

  the lean and the limp

  shimmy and sway

  i capture movement and rise in a wave.

  i was forgotten by tomorrows,

  today i survive in the telling of story

  free long before i was enslaved.

  yesterday shakespeare mocked the myths of our meaning and wrote it down.

  i was the blood shed

  the blood shedding

  the falling, listen.

  listen

  still

  a river i flow

  a river in a rap

  listen still a river,

  a river in a rap

  i flow and reason

  the wrong

  she sweats

  the first time i ran into freedom

  she was smoking a cigarette

  lounged on the curb

  sipping on a sweating beer bottle

  mumbling toward the sky

  her elbows shivering on her knees

  waving me over

  i was on my way to change

  the world somewhere

  i don’t really remember where exactly

  i was in a hurry though

  and perhaps i wouldn’t have ever stopped

  had she not appeared so familiar

  her face photographed in my mind

  hewing and celestial

  i remember her hair

  night and twilight

  flew down her back

  water falling into the air

  she was a working woman

  woke up every morning at dawn

  eavesdropping on the souls of black folk

  rushing and dazed

  weary and struggling

  she noted the children

  tumbling and scraped knees

  the faces of our mothers

  parched and inevitable

  the fathers—

  freakishly bamboozled

  bound in shadows

  this is life.

  she inhaled an opera of smoke

  and exhaled an orchestra of pain

  told her i had to be on my way

  and she cleverly replied

  oh, that’s right. you have to go change the world.

  her smile squeezed between her lips

  hugging the horizon of her face

  i walked off

  having caught her smile

  freedom’s smile is a contagious spirit

  a rattling song of the heart.

  daughters of a new day

  rousing demonstrations

  across the country, globe, and minds

  protest is a petition for presence

  a dress draping in front of a military tank

  it is a black girl scaling a 30-foot pole to take down a confederate flag

  the intuitive urgency of doing whatever must be done

  tormented by willful silence

  courageous voices raise and riot

  what cannot be killed

  fingers in the shape of a heart, a fistful of blistered blues

  we take to the streets, picket signs in our blood, our ancestors

  marching through a nightmare, we rise toward freedom

  we resist and live as if a right to be

  unoccupied, embarrassing borders

  state violence is as intimate as a forced kiss, busted lip, or bloodied eye

  we feel it in our bones, deeply

  how do you matter a life?

  the terrain of our struggle to live

  our sense of community goes deeper than who we inhabit space with,

  it is in the syncing of bodies that never touch

  solidarity is a witnessing, the risk, the power to act

  it is in the radical fight to care

  to nurture what in you endures

  the spiritual war of class

  the rally for lovers to love

  a transwoman dancing with herself in a crowded room for the first time

  is too, a protest

  a mother in Hebron dresses her daughter in dreams, existence

  is too, resistance

  a Syrian father reunited with his son on the shore of his arms

  is too, a revolution

  a frizzed South African girl full of kink and spine, resting her hair in her hands

  is too, an act of political warfare

  we protest to empower personhood

  more than mourning, we roar

  be not discouraged, be not dismayed

  be defiant and deliberate

  always, be.

  My mother does not worry about me; she fears me. She fears the power of the life she helped breathe into me. She fears the lessons she taught me will move into action.

  She fears I might be willing to die rather than settle for less than the best of loving.

  —Cherríe Moraga

  acknowledgements

  in loving memory of Sandra Prevost: i am a better woman because of your mothering.

  i would not be here without my mother Ena Mae Bacquie, who would not be here without my grandmother Graciela Bacquie. thank you for all that you are and all that you endured to carry us. to my sister, Tiffany Wong, i love you. i would not be here without my father Angel Buscamper, who would not be here without my grandmother Hermes.

  i want to thank Daphne Kolader and Nelson Caban for their support, encouragement, love, and friendship over the years. y’all are my family. there were many days i called and you answered, many days i knocked and you opened your door. thank you for loving me through some of the darkest nights and brightest mornings. thank you to the village: Hollis Heath, the Heath family, Lauren Justin, Lauren Hill, Chinaka Hodge, Akeema Anthony, Tamara Davidson, the Davidson family, Giselle Buchanan, Saturn Renge, the Williams family, Ferrari Sheppard, Cameron Burkett, Lise Vanderpiete, Gia Abrassart, Elier “El Brujo” Alvarez, Gia Hamilton and Auttie, Arlene Casimir, Viviana Martinez, Emilie Saada, and Susanne Rostock.

  to my life mentors and poetry advisors over the years, thank you: Mahogany Browne, Abiodun Oyewole, Saul Williams, Michael Cirelli, Lemon Anderson, Ellison Glenn, Jeffrey McDaniel, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Cynthia Cruz, Ruth Margraff, Calvin Forbes, Craig Harshaw, Vievee Francis, and Gregory Pardlo. thank you, Carrie Mae Weems, for your inspiration, support, and art. thank you to Urban Word NYC. thank you to Brett Bevell and Helema Kadir for all the love y
ou pour into the world, and to Omega Institute for Holistic Studies for giving me space to learn and practice.

  a special thanks to Meghann Plunkett and May Alhassen, who spent hours upon hours reading and listening to poems. thank you for believing in me and helping me to communicate my most intimate feelings, thoughts, and ideas.

  thank you to Julie Fain and Haymarket Books for supporting this book.

  to all my students and mentees over the years: i look forward to what you will do in the world! i’ve learned so much from you all.

  to my twin flame, my one true Love (with a big L): umi selah, fka Phillip Agnew, thank you for doing what love does, for supporting me, listening to me, and growing with me. this book would’ve taken another ten years without your encouragement. i learn so much from you. you inspire me.

  to all my sisters and brothers in struggle—thank you for fighting and loving beyond.

  about haymarket books

  Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago.

  Our mission is to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. We strive to make our books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the education and development of a critical, engaged, international left.

  We take inspiration and courage from our namesakes, the Haymarket martyrs, who gave their lives fighting for a better world. Their 1886 struggle for the eight-hour day—which gave us May Day, the international workers’ holiday—reminds workers around the world that ordinary people can organize and struggle for their own liberation. These struggles continue today across the globe—struggles against oppression, exploitation, poverty, and war.

  Since our founding in 2001, Haymarket Books has published more than five hundred titles. Radically independent, we seek to drive a wedge into the risk-averse world of corporate book publishing. Our authors include Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Rebecca Solnit, Angela Davis, Howard Zinn, Amy Goodman, Wallace Shawn, Mike Davis, Winona LaDuke, Ilan Pappé, Richard Wolff, Dave Zirin, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Nick Turse, Dahr Jamail, David Barsamian, Elizabeth Laird, Amira Hass, Mark Steel, Avi Lewis, Naomi Klein, and Neil Davidson. We are also the trade publishers of the acclaimed Historical Materialism Book Series and of Dispatch Books.

  also available from haymarket books

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  Edited by Mahogany Browne, Jamila Woods, and Idrissa Simmonds (forthcoming)

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  Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

  Angela Y. Davis, edited by Frank Barat, preface by Cornel West

  From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

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  Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice

  Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena Gutiérrez

  The Whiskey of our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent

  Edited by Quraysh Ali Lansana and Georgia A. Popoff,

  introduction by Sonia Sanchez

 

 

 


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