Poet Laureate of Carrboro, NC 2019 -2022 / 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow
I think these doors speak
for themselves portals
to absolute otherwheres
on the flip side of the Black
Atlantic, where the long reign
of the upside down still reigns
& those dishonored in darkness’
name are still looking for the light
of anything to explain the stillness
These are a few images from our day trip Ile de Goree, while we were in Dakar. I have mixed feelings about what I saw there. In some way I have glad that UNESCO has designated the island as a World Heritage site, but I am somewhat dismayed about how touristy and commercial the island is. I do understand that the this helps the local economy and does improve the lives of the people who live and work on the island, but I am still troubled by the fact that Ile De Goree is also a cemetery and resting place for those captured and enslaved there.
I have a lot more to say about what I observed, felt and learned, but let’s start here…
This is the long road from to and from Kpalime. On our way back to Lome we got a flat on this long and pulled over on the side of the road.
While we were waiting for Mohammed, on the right above, to go get more air in the spare tire….Bruno, the guy seated in the middle above, decided to take a look around. He sees a path off the road into the woods so he ducks be the brush and finds….
this guy Eric, weaving baskets for sale at the market. Bruno calls us all over to come and look, plus it was much cooler under the shade around Eric’s house.
When I walked in and got a look at what Eric was doing I almost cried. The basket he was making was exactly the same basket that my Gullah/Low Country South Carolinian elders and ancestors make. He smiled with pride and told me that perhaps some of my ancestors are from Togo, I smiled and said back to him “Peut Etre” (Perhaps).
Eric was such a quiet, humble soul…I was honored to meet him and tried to explain to him how much of a blessing it was to run into him on the side of the road that. Seeing him do the same thing the same way my elders and ancestors do and have done was such a confirmation for me.
Some people need or want DNA to tell them where they are from, and while I find that interesting and enticing, I think I would much rather follow the culture and find kinship that way.
If we had not gotten a flat tire, i would have never met Eric. Although it was hot and inconvenient, it was a blessing, one I will never forget and a got a chance to me a potential long lost cousin.
A post that needs no explanation…good food, good people…love
Ok maybe one explanation….
The above pic is Damigou, Melanie’s sister in Togo from her time in the PeaceCorps 10 years ago. This is how Damigou looks all of the time, not cooking but smiling…always smiling. She is a young woman with a lot of love in her heart and shows in everything she does including cooking which she did for us our entire visit to Lome.
About a year ago I bought a book from Phaidon called The Music of Painting: Music, Modernism and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to John Cage by Peter Vergo. Although I was a bit skeptical from the title, I thought I still would go ahead and take a chance. I also looked at the table of contents and the section titles left me with some hope. Over the past year or so I have paged through the book, but other than one small reference to Romare Bearden;Vergo anecdotaly claims that Stuart Davis advised Bearden “to listen to the freedom that characterized Earl Hines’ piano playing.” In reading an interview with Bearden on Archives of American Art website, it appears that David and Bearden were two friends sitting around talking about music:
Avis Berman: It seems to me that your coloring has really gotten very much purer over the years – almost like the climate, you know, like the West Indies where you get that kind of color, and I was wondering how you had evolved your color schemes.
Romare Bearden: Well, I think the big thing about. I was a great friend of Stuart Davis, and he used to listen to Earl Hines’s music, all the time. And the main. And he used to say, “You know, listen to what he isn’t playing, what they call the interval, and, it’s what you don’t need.” You know it, but you throw it out, you don’t need too much. You know, you just have to find the things now that you need, because. The artist’s problem isn’t, say, the problem of the Renaissance, because if you look at a painting of scenes of. of photographs of Matisse of this day, the other day, about twenty days, until the whole thing is achieved. And each painting is different, until he finally gets to the one and changes this and the other. And so in the modern, in the modern art, seems bent on destruction and new beginnings, destruction and new beginning. And in the past, say the Renaissance, say Tintoretto, or someone, Titian, do a sketch, and they carried it out pretty much. Because so much of the art was built on skill. And we don’t need a lot of the things that ehy had to put in. And this is a round-about way of telling you ____ ____ ____.
Being a composer himself, I hardly think Bearden needing advising on how to hear freedom in a jazz musicians playing. To be completely honestly, I find a quite a bit of irony in a a non-African American advising an African American to hear the freedom in a musical expression that his African American ancestors created.
Anyway, other than that minor reference to Bearden, I found no other references to African or African American painters or musicians. This seemed rather odd for book titled The Music of Painting to not include any African or African American painters, musicians or references..AT ALL. I mean how can you talk about music, painting and modernism and not reference ANY Africans or African Americans? How can you have a section called Art, Jazz and Silence and not include Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor or Ornette Coleman? It seems to me that these kinds of omissions are deliberate and I am not sure how or why a publisher would…well..nevermind.
The one bright moment while going through this book was an image in this book that made me think of another book I bought around the same time, Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist.
On page 305 of The Music of Painting, there is a sequence of 8 images from Walt Disney’s 1940 classic Fantasia. The first time I glanced at these images though I immediately thought of Aaron Douglas’ paintings. This clearly set off a series of questions in my head that are still bouncing around in my mind. Is is possible that Walt Disney was inspired or influenced by Douglas’ work? If so, what kind of options do we have with today’s technology to remix Douglas and add motion and sound to his already majestic and cinematic work?
I will be revisiting this as I dig more into the book, Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist. Stay tuned…
Today is the birthday of Sterling A. Brown, a folklorist, poet and literary critic who spent over 40 years teaching and mentoring at Howard University. I will always remember Amiri Baraka telling the story of being in a group of students going to a room in Brown’s house with wall-to-wall recording of jazz and blues, then Brown proclaiming to the group “This is your history!”
Despite growing up in a musical and arts exposed houshold, I still feel like i came late to Sterling A. Brown. I was in my early 20’s and had just started frequenting the open mics poetry sets in DC from the MUG to Mangoes , Bar Nun to Black Cat and Kaffa.
I am honored to have the opportunity to open The Center for Poetic Thought in the Brookland neighborhood that Brown called home so many years while teaching and mentoring at Howard University. The Center is in large part a dedication to Sterling A. Brown and our interests in trying to expand on the tradition of innovation in poetic thinking that poets like Sterling A. Brown helped to build.
Please stop by and see us. The Center for Poetic Thought is located at 716 Monroe Street NE, Studio #25, part of the new Monroe Street Market in the Brookland neighborhood of NE DC.
The following images are me playing around with the Pano feature on my iPhone. I was trying to see what would happen if i did “vertical panoramas” instead of horizontal ones.
I am not totally happy with the result, but is was phone to play…I will keep trying in different contexts to see how it alters my experience.
From left to right, the 1st and 3rd are pictures in the courtyard of the hotel we stayed in in downtown Lome. In the 1st image if you look carefully you can see my feet. The 2nd pic is of this awesome tree I saw that had grown like an arc over the basin of the Kpalime waterfall. The 4th pic are of the waterfall in Kpalime, if you llook closely you can see Melanie down there at the bottom. During rainy season the waterfall would be much more impressive.
While in Togo we took a ride up to Kpalime, which is in the next prefecture up from the prefecture that Lome is in.
This was a cool totem at one of the artisinal markets in Kpalime. Although the had some really nice items we found that things were a bit pricey when compared to similar items in Lome.
This area is very close to the border with Ghana, thus the people in this area are part of the same ethnic group, Ewe. The Ewe, span both Togo and Ghana. In the month of November, the inhabitants of this area has a festival called Kpalikpakpaza , the first festival was held in 1997. “The festival is meant to remind the Kpalime people of the valour of their ancestors during wars in the ancient days.”
I am going to do some more research about this festival, because I have long been searching for a festival (or celebration) to replace Kwanzaa, which I have never quite been a fan of or quite understood why African Americans with genetic and cultural lineage to West Africa would accept a festival whose lingua franca is Swahili (East African) and whose founder has such a problematic past. Anyway, that is a discussion for another time…
Stay tuned…
Over the Easter Weekend, Melanie and I had a great time in Lomé, Togo. I can now understand one of the many reasons why Togo has found such a special place in Melanie’s heart and many others in our circle of friends. I will be posting some pics that we took and some that our friends took on our visit.
You can also visit “With a Poet’s Eye”, my Instagram for some other views of our trip to Lomé and in general to keep up with what we are up to. http://www.instagram.com/fjoiner
Every since I first saw The Roots “Do You Want More?” album cover, something about it has always seemed like “a visual sample” of Romare Bearden’s “Pittsburgh Memory”. Although I am not quite sure that the structure over the head of the character on the right in Bearden’s collage is a bridge, but it is definitely some type of city infrastructure that suggests the same type of feeling from a visual standpoint.
As I think about Bearden’s eye, I think it is safe to say that he and The Roots have/had their eyes/ears/bodies steeped in the concerns of “the folk” , the everyday people that poem beauty and ugliness into song that sings on canvas, stage, page, tongue, arm, leg, leg, arm, head, whatever…
What I enjoy most about The Roots, whether or not i totally dig the album from a musical angle, is that their albums always give me something to think about as an entire package, cover, liner notes (those Major Jackson joints were the bomb), song titles, ideas in the songs, etc, etc…and that is what I am most looking forward to in this new album…Ear up!