Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
The witness of poetry is a powerful force; it not only can describe events, it also can give voice back to those people and things that have been rendered voiceless. Martin Luther King not only fought for civil rights in the U.S., he also fought against war and oppression around the world. He advocated for human rights to the lowest peasant in the most oppressed regions. He encouraged his followers to extend the fight to those so oppressed.
A little more than ten years after Martin Luther King's assassination, Carolyn Forché travelled to Salvador. It’s a powerful reminder of what living in an authoritarian regime is really like, and why we must resist ever becoming one.
The witness of her poetry is never more powerful as when she recounts her conversation with...
What you have heard is true. I was in his house.
His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar.
His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night.
There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him.
The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house.
On the television was a cop show.
It was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace.
On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores.
We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid.
The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread.
I was asked how I enjoyed the country.
There was a brief commercial in Spanish.
His wife took everything away.
There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern.
The parrot said hello on the terrace.
The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table.
My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing.
The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home.
He spilled many human ears on the table.
They were like dried peach halves.
There is no other way to say this.
He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass.
It came alive there.
I am tired of fooling around he said.
As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-
selves.
He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air.
Something for your poetry, no? he said.
Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice.
Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
1978
-- Carolyn Forché
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Sit at the tables where people are deciding where the new school will go, whether to expand the bus stop or if a new business can drop itself into a neighborhood, and the first question that comes to mind is, “Where are all the people of color?”
In 2017 it is—still—a fact that most folks who design, plan and build our cities lack the diversity found in those same places. Last week in Seattle, a panel of experts tackled this problem at the Congress for the New Urbanism, an annual gathering of progressive planners.
Why should this matter? At a time when black America faces mortal threats from institutional racism, police violence and the authoritarian power grab in Washington, D.C., don’t we have more important things to worry about than urban-planning issues? Who has time to meddle in zoning and land ordinances?
But you’ll be wishing you had understood it that moment you’re being gentrified off your block. Our lives are shaped by the places we live, to the extent that “zip codes are life determinants,” said Ron Sims, former deputy secretary for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, at the meeting. “Tell me your zip code, and I can predict how much you earn, when you will die and whether you will get kicked out of school.”
The places we live even affect our bodies at the molecular level. Children from crime-ridden neighborhoods have higher levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, which is linked to learning problems, as well as a host of physical and mental illnesses. Environmental factors like toxins and stress can actually alter our genes (pdf), creating changes in our brains that last a lifetime.
That means the people who design and plan cities are “fooling around with people’s genes without their permission,” said Sims.
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Residents hear mice rustling in the walls at night. Some occupants leave ovens on in the winter, their doors perched open, because furnaces fail. Ceilings droop from water damage, mold creeps across walls, and roaches scramble out of refrigerators.
So when federal authorities finally deemed two public housing developments here in the southernmost tip of Illinois unacceptable and uninhabitable, it felt like vindication of what residents had been saying for ages.
But then came the solution: an order that everyone must vacate.
The authorities announced last month that the cost of fixing the developments was out of reach, and that replacing them altogether would cost almost 10 times as much. For hundreds of residents, the decision may mean not only leaving these crumbling buildings, but also moving from Cairo altogether.
“For sure they needed to fix this place up a long time ago,” said Nena Ellis, 38, a mother of three who lives in the McBride development, which, along with a second complex, Elmwood, is now set for demolition. “But there’s really nowhere else for us to go around here — even with a housing voucher, there just aren’t other places.”
“Are we all supposed to just scatter to other cities — to big cities?” she asked. “Our kids grew up in Cairo. Our memories are in Cairo. And if you take this place out, it’s knocking everything else down in Cairo with it.”
This is the problem of decaying public housing complexes in a small, fading and remote city.
In an age when mixed-income and scattered, voucher-based housing has long overtaken the old model of large public complexes, Cairo (pronounced CARE-oh) has a shrinking population now down to fewer than 3,000, no functioning grocery store or gas station, and a main thoroughfare with an ornate, arching entry that reads “Historic Downtown Cairo” but one that features shuttered storefronts, vacant lots and, on a recent day, not a person in sight.
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In 1811, Charles Deslondes, a mixed-race slave driver from Saint-Dominique, Haiti, led what would become the largest slave rebellion in American history. Composed of 500 men, many of whom had participated in the successful Haitian revolution only a few years prior, Deslondes’s army advanced on New Orleans with a military discipline that surprised many of their adversaries. As they marched along the Mississippi River—drums rumbling, flags held high above their heads—they attacked several plantations with an assortment of scavenged weapons. Within 48 hours, local militia and federal troops had suppressed the rebellion and Deslondes was ruthlessly executed—his hands were chopped off, he was shot in both legs, and then burned to death in a bale of straw.
The rebellion’s import has changed over time. In the immediate aftermath, the backlash was brutal. Alarmed slaveholders in Louisiana invested resources in training local militia, and slave patrols began surveying slave quarters with increasing frequency and ruthless violence. Meanwhile, the federal government realized that in order to defend Louisiana, it would also have to defend the institution of slavery. It formalized this commitment in 1812, when the United States officially granted Louisiana statehood. Louisiana remained a state until 1861, when it seceded from the Union. There is no doubt why it did this, as its leaders said so explicitly: “Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery.”
Today, the rebellion of 1811 is a historical cornerstone in an ongoing attempt to foster an honest reckoning with the past. Last week, a statue of Confederate leader Jefferson Davis, originally erected in 1911, was removed in New Orleans. This week, an equestrian statue of the Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard was also pulled down by authorities. Along with the removal of a monument to the Battle of Liberty Place, which commemorated a Reconstruction-era insurrection by white supremacists, three of a planned four monuments have been taken down. At the forefront of the effort to have the statues removed is a group of young, black activists known as Take ‘Em Down NOLA.
Michael “Quess?” Moore, an educator, poet, and playwright, has become one of the faces of this movement. On a recent evening in his New Orleans home, his long dreadlocks draped over his shoulders and chest, he told me what had inspired him to get involved in this project, his stories moving fluidly between past and present. When he moved to New Orleans, Moore, originally from Brooklyn, attended a lecture by two black New Orleans historians, Malcolm Suber and Leon Waters, to whom he attributes the development of much of his political education. Suber and Waters, who run a tour in New Orleans called “Hidden Histories,” have made it their mission to bring to light the parts of black history in the Crescent City that you won’t find in your typical textbook, including Deslondes’s rebellion.
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Creators of color have perhaps more outlets than ever before to tell the stories of their communities and empower others within the industry. But as "Queen Sugar" creator Ava DuVernay says in a new The Hollywood Reporter (THR) showrunner roundtable, the surge of attention can force those creators to work at a pace their White counterparts don't experience.
"Embedded in that very question is the idea that privilege does not apply," she says in response to interviewer Lacey Rose's query about the showrunners' confidence in turning down projects. She continues:
For me to say no [to projects], in my mind, there may not be another chance. There's a natural tension with anyone to keep the chance for the open door. When you add to that issues of representation and marginalization that go on top of the artist's feeling of 'Can I get my thing made?' it becomes challenging for me to say no. I get an opportunity from Netflix. 'Do you want to make a doc?' 'Yes, I want to make a doc.' Apple: 'Would you like to make a commercial?' 'Yes, I will make that commercial.' I'm running around doing everything because I love it, but also because there is the fear that any artist has that there won't be another question asked to say no to. And on top of that, the fear that the industry might shift in terms of its attention to women right now or the current renaissance regarding people of color, specifically Black folk on TV, and then you're left with nothing.
DuVernay later describes how industry executives try to put her in topical boxes: "I get the first Black everything. First Black firefighter in Tacoma, Washington. First Black ballerina to dance in Kansas City. I mean, it's getting so specific that it's like every first Black doesn't need a movie."
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A common piece of professional advice is to find a good mentor. But sometimes, that simple guidance is difficult to follow. For women and people of color attempting to forge careers in predominantly white or male-dominated industries, seeking out a mentor can be more challenging: Research has shown that mentors tend to choose mentees who remind them of themselves. And young mentees tend to be most comfortable with those who are from similar backgrounds.
On a larger scale, a lack of mentorship can compound an industry’s diversity problem, giving many younger professionals few people to champion or guide them, and causing them to leave a company or field before they ever reach an organization’s upper echelon.
Lauren Williams, who is 30 years old, works in media, an industry where diversity can be hard to come by toward the top of organizational charts. For anAtlantic series on mentorship, I recently spoke with Williams, the features editor at Essence and a newly-minted fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, about her experiences in media and how her mentor, Vanessa De Luca, Essence’s editor in chief, changed the course of her career. The conversation that follows has been edited for length and clarity.
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