Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Scholars tend to downplay her connection with the Black Arts Movement, but Jayne Cortez was one of the most important writers of the Movement. She developed her approach to surrealism, which was always dipped in blues, during the early 1970s when she was living in New York. The Poet, Quincy Troupe, probably synthesized her work in the most powerful declaration at her passing;
"Many times we recoil in horror from what we hear and feel in the poetry of Jayne Cortez; sometimes many of her poems make us want to weep, not for her, but for ourselves, our own transgressions, our own particular weaknesses, as well as the weaknesses of the world; then there are the poems that makes us angry, both at Ms. Cortez, for telling us a particularly, penetrating truth, and at ourselves for committing the acts that the poem is addressing itself to; but at no time in listening to and reading the poetry of Jayne Cortez, are we failed to be moved by the power of her impact."
I had the great fortune to see Cortez perform her poems several times in Los Angeles when I was a young poet. She was a tour de force in the movie, Poetry in Motion, and if you haven’t already, you should take it in. Though she is missed greatly, Jayne Cortez remains the most necessary poet there is for these precarious and careless times.
Disguised in my mouth as a swampland nailed to my teeth like a rising sun
you come out in the middle of fish-scales
you bleed into gourds wrapped with red ants
you syncopate the air with lungs like screams from yazoo
like X-rated tongues
and nickel-plated fingers of a raw ghost man
and somewhere stripped like a whirlwind
stripped for the shrine room you sing to me through the side face of a black rooster
In the morning in the morning in the morning all over my door like a rooster in the morning in the morning in the morning
And studded in my kidneys like perforated hiccups inflamed in my ribs like three hoops of thunder through a screw
a star-bent-bolt of quivering colons
you breathe into veiled rays and scented ice holes
you fire the space like a flare of embalmed pigeons
and palpitate with the worms and venom and wailing flanks
and somewhere inside this fever
inside this patinaed pubic and camouflaged slit
stooped forward on fangs
in rear of your face you shake to me in the full crown of a black rooster
In the morning in the morning in the morning
Masquerading in my horn like a river eclipsed to infantries of dentures of diving spears
you enter broken mirrors through fragmented pipe spit
you pull into a shadow ring of magic jelly
you wear the sacrificial blood of nightfall
you lift the ceiling with my tropical slush dance
you slide and tremble with the reputation of an earthquake
and when i kick through walls
to shine like silver
when i shine like brass through crust in a compound
when i shine shine shine you wail to me in the drum call of a black rooster
In the morning in the morning in the morning gonna kill me a rooster
in the morning
early in the morning
way down in the morning
before the sun passes by in the morning in the morning in the morning
In the morning when the deep sea goes through a dog's bite
and you spit on the tip of your long knife
In the morning in the morning
when peroxide falls on a bed of broken glass
and the sun rises like a polyester ball of menses
in the morning
gonna firedance in the petro
in the morning
turn loose the blues in the funky jungle
in the morning
I said when you see the morning coming like
a two-headed twister
let it blow let it blow
in the morning in the morning
all swollen up like an ocean in the morning
early in the morning
before the cream dries in the bushes in the morning
when you hear the rooster cry cry rooster cry in the morning in the morning
I said disguised in my mouth like a swampland
nailed to my teeth like a rising sun
you come out in the middle of fish-scales
you bleed into gourds wrapped with red ants
you syncopate the air with lungs like screams from yazoo
like X-rated tongues
and nickel-plated fingers of a raw ghost man
and somewhere stripped like a whirlwind
stripped for the shrine room you sing to me through the side face of a black rooster
In the morning in the morning in the morning
-- Jayne Cortez
"In the Morning"
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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"Breaking a Monster," which follows metal trio Unlocking the Truth, shows a group member's parents candidly discussing why they turned the young band's future over to professional managers. Color Lines: Doc About Black Teen Metalheads Mistreated by Music Industry Execs.
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Black teen metal band Unlocking the Truth became a viral sensation thanks to a 2013 video of the members shredding in Times Square. The three ensuing years saw drummer Jarad Dawkins, bassist Alec Atkins and guitarist/singer Malcolm Brickhouse sign an exploitative record deal with Sony, resist music industry pressures and establish themselves as more than a novelty—all while trying to be kids. Their struggles in an industry that often exploits Black artists were captured for a documentary; "Breaking a Monster" was released on DVD and video on-demand (VOD) yesterday (October 11).
In the clip above, posted by Shadow and Act, Brickhouse's parents Noreen and Tracey talk about their decision to turn over the band's managerial duties to professionals. "I put myself in this position and I'm flying the plane as I'm building it," Noreen says.
Shadow and Act also described documentary scenes that perfectly encapsulate the band's discomfort with sleazy music industry practices:
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The Ethiopian government has declared a state of emergency following a week of anti-government violence that resulted in deaths and property damage across the country, especially in the restive Oromia region.
Rights groups say that since last year more than 500 people have been killed in protests in the Oromia region surrounding the capital Addis Ababa.
Anger about a development scheme for the capital turned into broader anti-government demonstrations over politics and human rights abuses as the government promotes Ethiopia as one of Africa’s top-performing economies.
The government says the death toll is inflated.
In a televised address on Sunday, Ethiopia’s prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn said the state of emergency was declared because there has been “enormous” damage to property.
“We put our citizens’ safety first. Besides, we want to put an end to the damage that is being carried out against infrastructure projects, education institutions, health centers, administration and justice buildings,” said Desalegn on the state Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation.
“The recent developments in Ethiopia have put the integrity of the nation at risk,” he said.
“The state of emergency will not breach basic human rights enshrined under the Ethiopian constitution and won’t also affect diplomatic rights listed under the Vienna Convention,” said Desalegn.
The internet is blocked across many parts of Ethiopia, residents reported on Sunday. The government has blocked the internet for more than a week to prevent protesters from using social media to get supporters to attend demonstrations.
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Trump and his ilk have spent a lifetime mistaking symptoms of a problem for the problem itself. They seek scapegoats in place of solutions. Their tone-deaf political rhetoric and their nonsensical social and fiscal policies stand as stark evidence. The instinct to misdiagnose and scapegoat has afflicted them with a fatal blindness—even when they look in the mirror, they see everyone but themselves. So it’s no surprise they don’t understand the nuance of rap and its evolution from counterculture to soundtrack of mainstream America. They cannot comprehend that Trump is the bad influence on rap, not the other way around.
Just as Donald Trump is the natural culmination of the degradation and corruption of our political discourse, rap has evolved into the natural culmination of our crass, reckless, distinctly American brand of capitalism and imperialism, an intertwining of consumption, violence and cultural incoherence. The misguided among us pitch Trump as an anti-establishment candidate, though he is simply the crudest, and in some ways most honest, depiction of establishment values; the misguided among us still view rap as counterculture when it’s really an indicator of where our mainstream culture stands.
In fact, rap is the most nakedly American genre of music going, with its cliché anthems of sex, money and murder just being an extreme microcosm of American societal ills. The lyrics are a raw and unfiltered echo of basic American rhetoric. At its most grotesque, rap is the appropriate score for a culture steeped in endless war at home and abroad and addiction to conspicuous consumption in the face of shrinking global resources. Contempt for black life, the embrace of excess, and extreme misogyny are not specific to rap—they make up the language of our society.
Rap mimics American culture and feeds it back to the mainstream in an extremely concentrated version. Trump supporters’ inability to assess their own culture—rife with misogyny, violence and excess, from its films to its sports to its commercials—leads them to mistake their own reflections as something entirely other and oppositional.
The other day, I was listening to Special Ed’s 1989 classic “I Got It Made” and it struck me that back then, when rap was truly counterculture, we had no idea Trump’s over-the-top boasting would become the norm for rap narratives:
“My name is Special Ed and I’m a super duper star/every other month I get a brand new car/got 20, that’s plenty, yet I still want more/kinda fond of Honda scooters, got 74/I got the riches to fulfill my needs/got land in the sand of the West Indies/Even got a little island of my very own/I got a frog, a dog with a solid gold bone.”
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A few minutes into Kantin Kwari market, sandwiched between the stalls selling grain and those hawking second-hand shirts, is a little alleyway where girls flock for advice. It is in short supply in Nigeria’s mostly Muslim north, where women are poorly schooled and married off at their fathers’ behest, often as children. Those with wedding woes or family dramas could do worse than consult the littattafan soyayya, or “love literature”, flogged by booksellers there.
Written in Hausa, these romantic novels are the work of mostly female authors, who have been printing their own works in Kano since Nigeria’s publishing industry fell apart in the 1980s. They are not exactly “Fifty Shades of Grey”, the West’s self-published sex sensation of recent times: many are classic Cinderella stories or pious parables about housewifery. But there are also blistering tales of child marriage, polygamy and philandering; subversive stuff for a conservative region.
This is sadly familiar to many of the authors. Balaraba Yakubu, a pioneer of the industry, recounts how she was removed from school to be married at 13. Another writer, Sa’adatu Baba Ahmed, had to marry her late husband’s polygamous brother. They say their books can teach lessons about equality that girls do not learn in school—if they go there at all. In some parts of northern Nigeria there are three boys in class for every girl. “A lot of women in our culture do not have a voice,” Ms Yakubu explains.
As with Charles Dickens in Victorian England, soyayya books are often serialised. The poor can snap them up for as little as 50 naira ($0.15) in open markets, where the most popular authors sell tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of copies. Abdulkadir Dangambo, a local professor, says that more books are now printed in Hausa than in any other African language. Some are made into local movies; and self-publishers turn into agony aunts as they field calls from fans.
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Nigerian defence officials say they believe more schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram will be released in the coming weeks, raising the prospect of a swift end to one of the most high-profile kidnappings perpetrated by a terrorist group in recent years.
Twenty-one of the 276 schoolgirls taken from their hostel in a government boarding school in the town of Chibok by the Islamic militant group in April 2014, were freed early on Thursday morning in a deal brokered by international mediators.
The kidnapping of the girls led to the global campaign #BringBackOurGirls, with public figures including the US first lady, Michelle Obama, taking part.
Few details have emerged of the ordeal of the abducted girls, many of whom are believed to have been taken as wives by extremists and systematically raped. Others have reportedly been forced to carry out demanding physical tasks.
About 190 girls from Chibok are still held by the militants. Fifty-seven fled within hours of being captured, and in May this year, one girl was found and rescued in an area close to Boko Haram strongholds.
“We’re not authorised to release the details of how the girls were retrieved yet, but the operation to retrieve the girls is ongoing. We are optimistic we will retrieve more of the Chibok girls from Boko Haram very soon, in the coming weeks,” Gen Rabe Abubakar, a defence ministry spokesman, said.
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MOHAMMED JAAFAR, a commander of Nigeria’s Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), recalls his first arrest with relish. It was in 2013, shortly after the vigilante group had been formed to fight the Islamist rebels of Boko Haram. A distressed neighbour appeared at his door in Maiduguri, the birthplace of Boko Haram, reporting that a radicalised relative was hiding in his house. “I knew I was now a target,” Mr Jaafar says. So he summoned his men, scaled his neighbour’s wall and seized the suspect, who was an emir: one of Boko Haram’s spiritual leaders.
Many Nigerians are proud of such derring-do on the part of the CJTF, which has swollen into an army of over 26,000 in Borno, the state worst affected by the insurgency. As north-easterners, its members claim to know the suspects in their communities, saving innocent bystanders from being rounded up by ill-informed regular soldiers. They tried to protect their towns when Nigerian troops fled the front line (a common occurrence until early last year). Some fought bravely alongside the army, too. As Boko Haram advanced on Maiduguri in 2014, for example, the vigilantes helped avert the fall of the city, which was then home to about 2m people. Today, they man checkpoints on roads and at refugee camps, logging trucks and farmers in tatty notebooks as they pass.
The CJTF has lost about 600 members, often to suicide-bombers whom they frisk at mosques and in market places: quite a sacrifice, especially given that only 1,800 of them receive a salary, a mere $50 a month. Many left good jobs to serve as volunteers. Mr Jaafar, a former cosmetics seller, reckons the vigilantes have handed over 5,000 jihadists to the army—some captured as far away as Lagos. That may be an exaggeration: at the height of the insurgency, American officials said that Boko Haram had between 4,000 and 6,000 “hard-core” fighters. Either way, the soldiers are mostly grateful for the help.
Yet the vigilantes, like the regular army, are accused of abuses. A video released by Amnesty International in 2014 appeared to show them, together with soldiers, slaughtering men beside a mass grave. When unarmed suspects escaped from a barracks at Giwa the same year, locals recall that the volunteers cordoned off streets in Maiduguri and killed them. More recently the CJTF has been implicated in the diversion of food destined for starving families. (“If they get rations, then why not us?” asks a perfectly healthy guard from his sandbag checkpoint.) Men who escape occupied villages complain of beatings in camps, where women and girls are subjected to systematic sexual violence, according Human Rights Watch, a New York-based monitor. On certain posts, the volunteers are clearly children.
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