Like the Singing Coming off the Drums

by Sonia Sanchez

  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