being an electronic nigger hating yo self & me
til you resist lying & gossiping & stealing &
killing each other on every saturday nite corner
til you resist having a baby cuz you want
something to love young sister. love yo self
til you resist being a shonuff stud fuckin
everything in sight, til you resist raping
yo sister, yo wife, somebody’s grandmother.
til you resist recolonizing yo mind
mind mind mind mind
resist
resist
resist for Tupac
resist for you & me
reSIST RESIST RESIST
for Brother
Tupac
Amaru
Shakur
REMEMBERING AND HONORING TONI CADE BAMBARA
how to respond to the genius
of our sister Toni Cade Bambara? How to
give praise to this brilliant. Hard. Sweet
talking Toni. Who knew everything.
Read everything. Saw everything?
I guess if we remember Willie Kgositsile’s lines:
if you sing of workers you have praised her
if you sing of brotherhood and sisterhood you
have praised her
if you sing of liberation you have praised her
if you sing of peace you have praised her
you have praised her without knowing
her name
her name is Spear of the Nation …
I would also add:
her name is clustered on the hills
for she has sipped at the edge of rivers
her words have the scent of the earth
and the genius of the stars
i have stored in my blood the
memory of your voice Toni linking continents
making us abandon Catholic minds.
You spread yourself rainbowlike
across seas
Your voice greeting foreign trees
Your voice stalking the evening stars.
And a generation of people began to question their silence. Their poverty. Their scarcity. Because you had asked the most important question we can ask ourselves:
What are we pretending not to know today? The premise as you said, my sister, being that colored people on the planet earth really know everything there is to know. And if one is not coming to grips with the knowledge, it must mean that one is either scared or pretending to be stupid.
You open your novel with the simple but profound question: Do we want to be well? And you said in an interview with Sister Zala Chandler that the answer tends to be “No! to be whole politically, psychically, spiritually, culturally, intellectually, aesthetically, physically, and economically whole—is of profound significance. It is significant because there is a correlative to this. There is a responsibility to self and to history that is developed once you are whole, once you are well, once you acknowledge your powers.”
Amiri Baraka wrote that Jimmy Baldwin was God’s black revolutionary mouth. So were you Toni. You made us laugh resistance laughter. You taught us how to improvise change shapes sometimes change skins. We learned that if we are to be, sometimes we must have been there already and have people wondering about us:
You asking about them colored folk?
They were just here. Ain’t they still there.
in place in Harlem, in Washington in
Chicago? i just seen em a second ago
they wuz dancing at the Palladium,
picking cotton, having a picnic in
the park drinking walking they
sanctified walk talking they
fast talk brushing the nightmare
of America off they foreheads.
Look there they be. That’s them laughing
that loud laugh over there. No that
ain’t them. They gone again like the wind.
Oh. You asking for them people from
forever ago time sifting time through
hands, announcing they are here intend
to be here. Listen. Listen You can hear
them breathing breaths not even invented
yet. laughing their resistance. hee hee hee.
You got to find me to get me.
Get on board children.
This Bambara liberation train
of the spirit, soul. This Bambara
train doing what Audre Lorde said:
forever moving history beyond nightmare
into structures for the future …
Get on board this liberation train called Bambara. Cmon lil children. And Toni had many children. She taught us how to organize. Be. Their names are Aishah, Mungu, Karma, Kevin, D Knowledge, Ras, Nora, Louis, Tony, Morani. Gar.
This is how i lay down my Praise:
What seas came from her eyes!
What oceans connected us from her
Southern and Eastern bones!
What waterfall of Bambara words transformed
Our lives, our hands into miracle songs!
This is how i lay down my love:
We are not Robert Oppenheimer quoting
Indian literature: I have become death.
We are. Must be. Must quote,
i have become life
and oppose all killings, murderings,
rapings, invasions, executions,
imperialist actions.
i have become life
and i burn silver, red,
black with life for our children
for the universe for the sake
of being human.
What we know today is that this
earth cannot support murderers,
imperialists, rapists, racists, sexists,
homophobes. This earth cannot
support those who would invent
just for the sake of inventing
and become death.
We must all say i have
become life, look at me
i have become life
i move like the dawn with a tint of
blue in my hair
i say, i say
i have become life and
i walk a path that clears
away the debris of
pornographers.
i have become life, light,
life, light, life,
light and i move
with my eyes
My hands holding up life
for the world.
i have become life …
POEM FOR CORNEL WEST
Aaayeee babo Aaaayeee babo
How do you praise a man who has traveled from Tulsa, Oklahoma, the first American city that dropped a bomb on an American community, to Harvard University?;
How do you see him walking always in his three-piece black suit, giving us lessons in morality and life? Always questioning the “morality” of the country/state/world that has enslaved and continues to enslave all of its citizens racially, and culturally, always questioning a country that remains silent while people stain the earth with their separate poverty, death, homelessness. Always questioning a country that denies the sanctity, the holiness of children, people, rivers, sky, trees, earth?;
I would say you look less at his credentials but more at the living work. The actions of a man destined to walk a preacher’s walk. A philosopher’s walk. A twenty-first-century man walk;
I would say you look at the father in him. The husband in him. The activist in him. The teacher in him. The lover in him. The truth seeker in him. The James Brown dancer in him. The reformer in him. The defender of people in him. The intellectual in him;
I would say that at the end of the twentieth century, we will remember him as a man who was present and bore witness to the terrible beauty of this time and the possibility of reconciliation and redemption;
This man. Born into history. This humanist. This twenty-first-century traveler pulling us screaming against our will towards a future
that will hold all of humankind in an embrace. He acknowledges us all. The poor. Blacks and whites. Asians and Native Americans. Jews and Muslims. Latinos and Africans. Gays and Lesbians;
For he has seen the leper in himself. In all of us. And he cries out against a policy of leperdom. No longer the yells from the cities.
The leper comes. The leper comes.
The leper comes. Who will feed
her or him?
Thank you my Brother for patrolling our lives. Thank you for walking among the flowers and the columns.
Thank you for magnifying our souls and making of us humans a long journey.
Aaaayeee babo
Aaaayeee babo
Aaaayeee babo for Cornel West
Cornel West
Cornel West …
Aaayeee babo means Praise God.
FOR SISTER GWEN BROOKS
you tell the stars
don’t be jealous of her light
you tell the ocean,
you call out to Olukun,
to bring her always to
safe harbor,
for she is a holy one
this woman twirling
her emerald lariat
you tell the night
to move gently
into morning so she’s
not startled,
you tell the morning
to ease her into a water
fall of dreams
for she is a holy one
restringing her words
from city to city
so that we live and
breathe and smile and
breathe and love and
breath her …
this Gwensister called life.
BEACON PRESS
25 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892
http://www.beacon.org
BEACON PRESS BOOKS are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
© 1998 by Sonia Sanchez
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Grateful acknowledgment is made for the permission to reprint from the poem “A Luta Continua” from When the Clouds Clear by Keorapetse Kgositsile.
12 11 10 12 11 10
Text design by Elizabeth Elsas
Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING - IN - PUBLICATION DATA
Sanchez, Sonia, 1935–
Like the singing coming off the drums : love poems / Sonia Sanchez.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8070-6843-4 (paper)
eISBN: 978-0-8070-9531-7
1. Love poetry, American. 1. Title.
PS3569.A468L5 1998
811′.54—dc21 97-33326
Like the Singing Coming off the Drums Page 3