by Pamela Sneed
But I remember the yellow green brown walls of Bellevue and St. Vincent’s Hospital
wards full of sick skinny gay men
covered in lesions and purple spots like in leper colonies
In my recent experiences with the healthcare system
I was kept in the front offices of a doctor’s office until I explained
I had fancy insurance
“Oh, why didn’t you say so,” he said.
Then I was led to a spare office in the back with a black leather couch
He pulled out a contract and was smiling so nice
So many times, I was sent to specialists who knew nothing
Once I gave my mother a computer, it broke somehow
and my dad not wanting to admit he knew nothing put the wires in
an impossible place.
I laughed, until I learned doctors do it, too.
Back in the day poet Hattie Gossett used to talk about the difference between
snow in Harlem and snow on the Upper East Side
Whereas in Harlem it wasn’t plowed and left in icy mounds
Turned black with soot, urine, and feces
When I graduated college and first began my teaching career
I worked at a literacy center in Harlem attached to a public elementary school
It was there I saw two Americas
Whereas like in South Africa under apartheid
Black students were given Bantu education
forced to speak Afrikaans
I read a headline in a newspaper the other day that called
an opiod epidemic in a white American town heartbreaking
They didn’t say the word heroin until much later and it said heartbreaking
Whereas I remember the crack epidemic in inner city Black neighborhoods
Some of which was planted to destroy them, and the people were called thugs,
addicts, menaces, thrown off welfare rolls
The war on drugs which is now admittedly a code for
the war against Black people
Rockefeller drug laws were invented to put immense numbers of POC
in jail for limited possession.
They got immeasurably long sentences and it was called anything but heartbreaking.
Given all that I have said
What if I told you that little smiley yellow emoticons
That all the texting and social media addicts use
are just masks
What if beneath them were war, savagery, rage, poverty, fear,
jealousy, envy, people fighting and
desperate to survive
After Trump was elected people on the left kept claiming
He’s stolen our democracy
I would never dispute his evil and our world is forever changed
But I have to ask
Exactly what democracy is it we are speaking of?
Is it the one of slavery and subsequent 100 years of Jim Crow?
Is it the slaughter of Native American people
Treaties broken like today’s voting machines in poor and Black neighborhoods?
Is it Standing Rock where a pipeline is driven through sacred Native lands,
People tear gassed arrested?
Is it the recent ICE detention centers, Brown people held for seeking asylum
and put in cages?
The millennium started with Bush’s stolen election
Which democracy is it we are speaking of?
Is it the one that started relentless never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
With thousands of casualties?
Is it the democracy that dropped Napalm on people running
Skin burnt off
Is it the one where a woman was assaulted daily
dragged across the world stage
and her perpetrator became the leader of a supposedly free world?
What if I said after Trump’s election
A veil lifted
And all we’ve lost are illusions
I don’t know about Obama, but the only hope I have
is in two moments—
When he entered office, he carried a book of poetry by Derek Walcott.
He wanted the world to see poetry’s importance.
Three months after he entered office
Obama boarded a plane to Ghana
He went to and was photographed at Cape Coast Castle, the former warehouse
Used for slaves
There Obama stood and looked onto the Atlantic.
He acknowledged slavery and the Middle Passage,
That’s the hope I have.
There in the loving defiance of Black slaves
In the unsung
runaways, the escapees, prisoners, martyrs
Those who never made it out
And in my students, the teachers, their voices, their formation,
inspiration
Artists shaping the world from earth and water into clay
CIRCUS ACTS
All rage aside
I gotta hand it to Trump and his admin because they
really have managed to stage the greatest heist
and show on earth
Like the old Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus
used to boast trapeze and live animal acts
before animal rights activists shut them down
I mean, this is like the heists in Oceans 11, 12, and 13
I could never watch because they seemed so contrived
Yes, they have delivered something so spectacular
it’s better than anything Karl Rove could have dreamt of
This even outdoes the architects of apartheid that turned the entire country
of South Africa into a jail for Black people
All I can think of is the movie Gladiator when Joaquin Phoenix plays
a corrupt emperor with no experience who
achieved power illicitly
When asked how he’d rule over the people
he said, “Give them games”
and every day slaves fill an arena to fight.
This is some high-wire sawed-in-half-lady shit
This is like some Hannah Arendt the banality of evil and
the bureaucratization of homicide shit
where the Holocaust was hidden in paperwork, menial tasks
everyone had a hand in
so no one saw the whole picture
I mean this is some sci-fi Octavia Butler and The Hunger Games shit
I mean nodding to Jayne Cortez’s
poem describing the rape of Joanne Little
Asking just what the fuck was she supposed to do
Tongue his encrusted toilet stool lips
Suck the numbers off his tin badge
choke on his clap trap balls
Squeeze the nub of his rotten maggots
Sing god bless America thank you
fucking my life away?
This is some scrambling around
too many balls in air
can’t keep track shit
More buttons pushed than when trapped in
an elevator panic
Some through the roof ratings shit
Record-breaking Roots shit
For pleasure, I watch the sci-fi spoof Agents of Shield
on Netflix
An agency of superheroes seeking justice
One of the characters said like the real-life Mark Zuckerberg
We no longer have to surveil people because
they offer up their information for free.
When alone, just to myself I secretly call Facebook/Racebook
Can’t say it out loud to anyone because you know …
people steal.
One of my friends, an older white woman who took the hit
for Abbie Hoffman
She went to prison.
She said, “Everything there is racialized,
they play movies constantly that will divide and create groups.”
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That’s what happens on Facebook.
We are constantly fed race stories
whipped up into frenzies
It like a civil war every day.
This is some deep shit shit.
Talking to one of my students and
they said, “Oh Trump’s so stupid,”
I started to yell, “That’s what they want us to believe.”
“He’s playing the character in a soap opera
And we experience him as a character we know.”
Years ago, I was asked to join panel for an academic discussion
on Beyoncé
I asked that we not consider her as a personality but as a business
Like a marketing machine
Every time a Hollywood celebrity wants to sell something
these days they say something shocking with regard to race and gender.
Singer John Mayer referred to his dick publicly as a white supremacist.
The Seinfeld guy was filmed in a club, responding to a Black heckler
and said something like, “You’re lucky you’re not hanging from a tree
with a fork up your ass.”
The Seinfeld box set was released the next day and sold millions of copies.
The day before Madonna’s album dropped she took to Twitter
referred to her Black son as, “My Nigga.”
It’s all a strategy like when Jay and Bey sampled the lines
preceding an infamous beating of Tina Turner by Ike on their album,
It said, “Eat the cake Anna Mae,”
referring to when Ike brutally shoved food into Tina’s mouth.
From the beginning, you could tell Trump was running on
a racist platform during the debates, everyone in his family
except Melania
died their hair platinum blonde and he made Hitleresque signals
to depict the Aryan race.
On the panel where I posited Bey and our reaction to her
as a business and result of clever marketing
there was great uproar and pushback by Black women
soon to graduate.
I don’t care if you like me, I said,
but there has to be
analysis.
BLACK PANTHER
I watched Black Panther
and all I could think of was oh no
Giving permission
for a new crop of Black Americans
to visit Ghana and West Africa
Saying things like I’m home
and giving the Wakanda salute
Since Africa was presented as so easy
Bite-sized McNugget friendly
Lion King chunks
Some Africans would welcome them
but others would laugh
Big lumbering dumb Americans
Like those speaking English loud in foreign places
Swimming naked in religious communities
because the world is their oyster
I was embarrassed by it
Humbly asking someone to pardon our naïveté or privilege
It’s not our fault we were brainwashed and estranged
I felt protective, too
remembering my trip to Ghana
The castle
Sitting at the edge of the ocean
Bathing
Where the ships were loaded
Walking through those dungeons
of unspeakable horror
Slaves standing knee deep
In feces and urine
Fishing food from waste
I wanted to protect what I saw there
Not wanting loud Black American tourists
with their soles walking all over the ground
At the slavery museum in Portugal
the guard explained to me
Most people don’t even know what this is
Even after we explain, he said
Black Americans are the worst
Come straight from the ocean
won’t wipe their dirty feet
ask where the whips and chains are
because they only want gore
I want to say there are some things the movie did well
I held back tears when I saw the cloth
The kente brought back memories
of my ancestral journey
The longing for home
When the young man travels through a portal
to the ancestral realm
There was beauty
I also knew well the storyline
The lost orphaned African American returning to Africa
It was my MFA thesis work
inspired by my trip to Ghana
And actually the scholarship didn’t belong solely
to Ta-Nehisi Coates
It was Sadiya Hartman who wrote the book, Lose Your Mother
I was shocked that a superhero film
would attempt the depth of subject
But it quickly turned into using Africa as a backdrop for
African American identity issues
I was offended, too
All I could think of was Safiya Bukhari
a Black Panther and political prisoner
dead at 53
And what was done to Fred Hampton
and Huey Newton
I wanted to scream at the film, This isn’t a revolution
They said with the merchandising it made billions
A cartoon, while our education healthcare neighborhood
are still lacking.
I thought other things too how it descended haplessly
into Black-on-Black war
and the CIA agent is a good guy
And female Black action figures
hadn’t been seen on screen for forty years
Since the days of blaxploitation
And the same in literature
Thirty years between a prominent political
Artist lesbian
Like Audre Lorde
So actually, where’s the progress?
MASK
I knew and I wrote years ago
that the entire sci-fi genre had changed
when at the end of one of the Planet of the Apes sagas
Caesar the talking ape responds to his white owner who infantilized him
On Caesar’s rise to the throne
he says, Come home Caesar
Caesar responds of earth and America,
I am home
I knew that was a nod to the Obama age,
the first Black man in the White House
But it tipped the genre on its head
when every alien before and after says they want to return home
and Caesar says defiantly,
I am home
No longer a native son
no longer the space alien or stolen African
In my MFA thesis work long before the new Apes movie
I placed the character of Caesar at the mouth of Cape Coast Castle
following a trail of body parts spread across the Atlantic
trying to find his people
For Caesar to say you must acknowledge us
Another seminal moment was when Robert Downey, Jr. said
to a shocked audience, I am Iron Man
That was the end of the masked Superhero
A secret identity people would risk their lives to hide and discover
I remember feeling uncomfortable not knowing how Marvel would resolve
something we’d been so accustomed to
But I also knew and it’s something I write often, how after 9/11
All Hollywood endings changed
In the film Ladder 49 actor Joaquin Phoenix who plays a firefighter
doesn’t emerge from the flames and it’s devastating
Something you might have only witnessed in some dystopian sci-fi
I’ve been watching the TV show Black Lightning
A Black comic-book hero
who’s
trying to save a disenfranchised devastated Black community like Flint
or any urban ghetto anywhere that’s been experimented upon
Drug ravaged whom the city wants to control
The only hope is Black Lightning
who is also a high school principal trying
to uplift the race
It’s corny as hell
with low production values
And the evil man is so sadistic
it makes me wince
But the show gets interesting with Black Lightning’s
two daughters who are also said to possess powers
the eldest teen is a lesbian
With lots of girl-on-girl action
The story gets interesting about ten episodes in
when his best friend the police chief
figures out who Lightning is and confronts him
I mean it should have been so obvious early on
It was ridiculous they didn’t know
But I wasn’t ready at all
when Black Lightning unmasked himself
His face naked before his friend
I felt his vulnerability
Raw powerlessness of being seen
Face wind eyes exposed
maybe it’s because we’ve always cloaked ourselves
historically
Made friends with night fall
Dawoud Bey showing the Underground Railroad at night
Utter blackness silver purple
Blue hue shades
DuBois Dunbar
A Black student reciting “We Wear the Mask”
Contemporary times teach you to hate
fear the woods and nature
The setting for horror
But for Black people
it is freedom
Maybe that’s why I winced
when he lifted his mask
Feeling both breath
and danger.
PROPHECY
Having been to Ghana twice, in 2005 and 2006,
the first time for almost a month and the second for two weeks,
a third time I traveled to South Africa in 2011
I could never call myself an expert on Africa, nor want to.
I can say that those trips changed my life forever, in mostly positive ways.
Based on those trips to Ghana and South Africa, I was able to predict
this moment in America where we would be obsessed with all things African
in art and film and culture.
I know when I saw the swirl of brown faces in Accra, experienced the bustling city
the stalls and stalls of vendors in Makola Market in Accra
and in Kumasi
and cell phones everywhere
I knew I was seeing gems of a hidden world/
with expanses of land, people, and innovation.
All I could say when I returned, as some white American tech giants