Preview #14,
Journal of Pan African Studies, Poetry Issue
Guest Editor, Marvin X
Deadline for submissions November 15
Send submission to jmarvinx@yahoo.com,
Include bio, pic, MS Word attachment
Neil Callender, Boston MA
The Maroon is Dead! Long Live the Maroon!
On the night Malcolm died, tough men, hewn from
Louisiana's woodlands and paper mills, and from
the battlefields of Europe and Korea gathered in their
town of Bogalusa. Our Maroon King, our Zumbi, lay cut down
in Harlem as these Maroons of the Sword, these Deacons for Defense,
accepted the quest to slay the Klu Klux dragon.
Weeks later, Maroons of the Pen, ascended
to Harlem, the crown city of Afro-modernity, to feed Africans
words of resistance and self-knowledge, to feed Africans
the manna of their own greatness, reconnect the African body
to the African mind and the African soul, quilt together what was
ripped apart in coffles, and in pest houses off Charelston, and in the barracoons
of Savannah.
From the wastelands of the Maafa--these barren and humiliating centuries,
precincts of death and apathy, the Maroon arises as redeemer.
He is opener of the way, she is the destroyer of illusions-- invincibility
of the Klan, superiority of Greece, ... ... . The Maroon is
keeper and maker of memory, the link between Imhotep and Lewis Latimer,
Queen Tiye and Ella Baker, between what was and what must be.
--Neil Callender
Neil Callender is a poet who is committed in his work to the rebirth of African Civilization. He believes that the erasure and falsification of the African past is integral to the project of oppressing African people and denying their humanity. The terrain of culture is central to telling the truth about the drama of the African story. He lives in the Boston area and teaches writing at Roxbury Community College. He is published in the antiwar anthology, Poets Against the Killing Fields.
Benicia Blue, Chicago IL
No Whammies No Whammies
No Mommy No Mommy
I am home by myself
Older sister isn't home yet
I am 8 or 9 or so
Me being home must be illegal
Must be a crime
Must be bad for Mommy
The police sure don't like it
The neighbors sure don't like it
I sure don't like it
Mommy going to the boat
With cash in hand
The dollars go afloat in the currents of
C
A
S
I
N
O
Mommy sailing away
Mommy stranded on her island of chance
Chances are I won't see her till morning
I Am 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20...
I am still home waiting
Her Boat of No whammies No whammies
This house of No Mommy No Mommy
Part 2
It’s just a release
I'm free when I'm there
It’s only me when I'm there
No responsibilities
No two girls
No two little girls
No two grown girls
I don't need them on my back
I don't need them checking my pockets
I need money in my pockets
Cha-Ching another hit on the slot Machine
This is my Fulfillment
This is my new void
This is my no worries
This is my no stress
This is my no tears till later
This is my destruction
This is my no Husband
This is my bankruptcy
This is my moving
This is my eviction notice
This my single parenting
This is my two daughters
This is my vulnerability
This is my bills to pay
This is my debt to make
This is my escape from life
This is my problem to solve
This is my addiction to crack
These are some reasons to go
These are some excuses to make
These are some issues I know
Gambling
Gambling
Gambling
Can take
--Benicia Blue
I am a Chicago native, a class of 2011 undergraduate at Columbia College Chicago. My major is in poetry. My work has been published by Girlspeak webzine and Mad Licks Zine. My poetry has also been featured on Young Chicago Authors website and Chicago public radio.
Tanure Ojaide, Nigeria
Songs from Across the Ocean Divide
1
There
you watch African Magic
an hourly addiction for many
or Super Story
on Thursday nights with light
here
I am racked in fantasies
of the interdependence of men and women
and the complementarity of light and dark
a human narrative
and when you switch channels
to Chelsea or Real Madrid
scoring fabulous goals
with hat tricks
I will still be staring at your photo
an untiring sport
waiting for you medicine-woman
to turn here your magical attention.
2
Over here, it’s neither dream nor vision
the sort in which the sokugo possesses you
to be a wanderer on an unending road
nor the sort in which the more water you throw
at the fire-engulfed the more irate the flames;
no, it’s not launching into a compulsive storm
that the rest of the world sees as a suicidal venture
but to you proffers only solace rather than peril.
It’s not the warring waves into which the swimmer
hurls himself to be helplessly lost in cosmic rage;
what transpires here is neither dream nor vision
of a fantasy that belies life as one knows it
in which in protest for denial of one’s desire
one takes the inevitable path to self-immolation—
either all or nothing; supreme peace or total war.
This is not a dream or vision of flight
on the back of a falcon coasting the skies
over a shark-infested ocean and singing
a lullaby for unborn virtues to come to life.
This is a spell of unknown proportion whose
words only the medicine woman can chant
to bring the world to the normalcy of ecstasy;
only she possesses the power to calm the waves,
put out the voluptuous flames, bring to an end
the civil war that ravages the entire polity,
and make love a dividend of freedom fighters.
This is not magical realism in which a man bleeds
out of love, a woman holds a man on a leash;
residence in an island of light or dark
in which it is forbidden to sneeze and throw
greetings across a fence to a neighbor;
a colony of mute parrots, even signs banished
with tongues and eyes sick from disuse.
A minstrel cries from a devastating fever
to the medicine woman out there gathering
her chants from weeds, forest herbs, garden
and daring to heal one not given a chance
and so cocksure of her curative craft.
A Fellow in Writing of the University of Iowa, Tanure Ojaide was educated at the University of Ibadan, where he received a bachelor's degree in English, and at Syracuse University, where he received both M.A. in Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English. He has published sixteen collections of poetry, two collections of short stories, a memoir, three novels, and scholarly work. His literary awards include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region (1987), the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry (1988, 1997), the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award (1988), and the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Award (1988, 1994, and 2003). Ojaide taught for many years at The University of Maiduguri (Nigeria), and is currently The Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1999, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award in 2002/2003, and The University of North Carolina’s First Citizens Bank Scholar Medal Award for 2005.
