saving darfur
i have always wondered how and why were so many people in the WEst to invested and engaged in saving Darfur. While the war in the Congo doesnt happen in the media.
goodnight aime cesaire
Aime Cesaire is dead/ His movement: negritude was the philosophic and poetic expression of black self-love and self-pride. And he was one of the messenger across continents maintaining our as blacks cultural discourse among the diaspora and Africa. Cultural workers sucha as Aime throughout the centuries, especially in the post-slavery twentieth century created languages and fed communities throughout. He was inspired by the Harlem Renaissance, born in the Carribbean-Martinique, and wrote about the Congo and Lumumba.
His writing gave me my first glimpses of Blackness and even though I disagree with some of articulations and interpretations of Black identity, i am grateful for the language the images the voice of a fierce Romanticism of the Black experience.
So goodnight.
check out The Root
and below: the Associate Press
Martinique poet Aime Cesaire dies at 94
By HERVE BRIVAL
From Associated Press
FORT-DE-FRANCE, Martinique (AP) — Aime Cesaire, a poet honored
throughout the French-speaking world and a crusader for West Indian
rights, has died at 94.
Cesaire died Thursday after at a Fort-de-France hospital where he was
being treated for heart problems and other ailments, said government
spokeswoman Marie Michele Darsieres.
He was one of the most celebrated cultural figures in the Caribbean
and was revered in his native Martinique, which sent him to France’s
parliament for nearly half a century and repeatedly elected him mayor
of the capital.
Cesaire helped found the “Black Student” journal in Paris in the
1930s that launched the idea of “negritude,” urging blacks to
cultivate pride in their heritage. His 1950 “Discourse on
Colonialism” became a classic of French political literature.
French Culture Minister Christine Albanel said Cesaire “imbued the
French language with his liberty and his revolt.”
“He made (the French language) beat to the rhythm of his spells, his
cries, his appeals to overcome oppression, invoking the soul of
subjugated peoples to urge the living to raise themselves up,” she
said.
His best known works included the essay “Negro I am, Negro I Will
Remain” and the poem “Notes From a Return to the Native Land.”
Cesaire was born June 26, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique and moved
to France for high school and university studies. He graduated from
one of the country’s most elite institutes, the Ecole Normale
Superieure.
Cesaire returned to Martinique during World War II and taught at a
high school in Fort-de-France, where he served as mayor from 1945 to
2001, except for a blip in 1983-84.
Even political rivals paid him homage.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy successfully led a campaign last
year to change the name of Martinique’s airport in honor of Cesaire,
despite the poet’s refusal to meet him in the run-up to the 2007
French elections. Cesaire endorsed Sarkozy’s Socialist rival,
Segolene Royal.
Cesaire complained that Sarkozy had endorsed a 2005 French bill
citing the “positive role” of colonialism. Cesaire spoke ardently
against the measure’s language, and it was later removed after
complaints from former French colonies and France’s overseas
territories.
“I remain faithful to my beliefs and remain inflexibly
anti-colonialist, ” Cesaire said in a statement at the time.
Sarkozy on Thursday praised Cesaire as “a great poet” and a “great humanist.”
“As a free and independent spirit, throughout his whole life he
embodied the fight for the recognition of his identity and the
richness of his African roots,” Sarkozy said. “Through his universal
call for the respect of human dignity, consciousness and
responsibility, he will remain a symbol of hope for all oppressed
peoples.”
Royal called him “an eminent symbol of a mixed-race France” and urged
that he be buried in the Pantheon, where French heroes from Victor
Hugo to Marie and Pierre Curie are interred.
“A great voice has died out, that of a man of conviction, of
creation, of testimony, who awakened consciousness throughout his
life, blasted apart hypocrisies, brought hope to all who were
humiliated, and was a tireless fighter for human dignity,” Royal said.
Cesaire was the honorary president of her support committee during
the presidential campaign.
Cesaire was affiliated with the French Communist Party early in his
career but became disillusioned in the 1950s and founded the
Martinique Progressive Party in 1958. He later allied with the
Socialist Party in France’s National Assembly, where he served from
1946-1956 and 1958-1993.
Associated Press writer Angela Doland in Paris, France, contributed
to this report.
“You can compromise on strategy and tactics, but not on principles.” (Barack Obama)
equatorial sun
Equatorial Sun
U.N. people
Stay in their trucks
Black insults
Thrown too much
To walk into
Blazing huts
America is having nightmares
Bared
To the world
Thousands of women
Are telling thousands of women
Stories
Survivors ascending
Out of flesh and jail
Buried
In mounds
Underneath flexible trees
They ask me
Where I am from
Red white and blue
American Pie DVD
And snow
When I get home
Heart of darkness
Recedes into night sky
Mythology
Of Congo chains
And slave
Gangs no name
Shame no money
Can’t destroy gun games
So the living is forgotten
Can’t name the life
That you’ve brought in
What it’s like to be dark
In light of logic of economics
That is cutting
Necks of rape survivors
On fire
Pregnant bartered
We’ve fallen into oblivion
Never reciting
Deaths of these martyrs
Innocent mothers
Street children quartered
In war
Every language creates
Difference between women
And whore
They call themselves
Same as they called me
Sister
Mama
Messenger
Has flown home
U.S. buys men
And women
And plays war with itself
We tune out
By turning on the news
We could choose to refuse
Good news
Somebody’s war
Is our gain
Our reign on this earth
And 4th world
Will emerge like herds
Of gazelles running
Through hills
And U.S. dollar Bills’
Military territorial hell
Gangbanging
Women to prove
They have something
Left to spill
In the 4th world where
Tupac is born hundreds
Of times day
And he prays to his mama
Not voice
Of the voiceless
But of choices
To enjoy life even when
She’s loaded with 50 kg
Manoc and groceries
Lives like fallen rice
Women who
Look like women who hold me
Through tears
I’m hiding
In my dreams
The Congo stretches
Like an equatorial
Bird’s wings
Soaring over diamond
Petal flowers
And gold studded trees
Richer than mahogany
Feet stomping
Out a drum beat
And women survivors
Are dancing with their children
Singing for amani
That leaves them breathless
Rather than helpless
With bones of the deathless
They are building
A civil society
In my dreams
Blinded by
Cover of a war
That we created
But still refuse
To see
In the Congo
Black light shines
In the middle of day
Women sway in layers
Of peacock colors
And young men
In mismatched military
Take-those-offs
Carry their gun by the barrel
Over the shoulders
Whistling Dixie
Caught in reflection
Of what we are willing to believe
Of just one more survivor’s
Dream
As long as there is
Women and color
There will always be hope.
butterfly riot
Butterfly Riot
Fur:
Not allowed to defend
Ourselves
Throwing rocks
At fenced wells
Watching gold butterfly
Lingering over sand pools
Quickly evaporating
No water
For thirsty
Except in jail
Majority breathes
Air that’s indigo soot
Shit stained back streets
And broken butterfly dreams
Speak history from dominant revisions
Plantation textbooks
Written in masters religion
Encaged in global genocide
Can’t hold us down
Can’t afford to hide
From suffering mama’s corn-rowed mind
We walk down the street
See who’s been left behind
Hearts encased in tanned hide
Protecting lungs
From crack filled highs
From black Jim lies
To gun gang strife
From revolutionary dreams
To jury and judiciaries
Pick us up we’re hurting
Each of us
Only got one heart
Bursting
Every assumption
Circling
Each other grabbing
Crumbs under a table
While mama
Rocking a rich man’s cradle
Telling African
Childhood fables
There is no real difference
Between assimilation and apartheid
Silk:
Marketing inversions
To destroy middle
Capitalism’s success
We mend a boat
To pick up
The bereft
Shipwrecked
Reaching for the dessicated
Dehydrated dream
Inside yellow butterflies
Exo-skeletal chest
Don’t offer us
Another way
Of dying died too
Many times before
Demarking conversions
To destroy middle
Passage conquest
Paper:
The village children
And I throw crumbled newspaper
Off the mountains
To see what happens
‘How come they don’t understand
That they can’t have such large families
And be liberated?’
A moth floats by and blurs
Our vision just one more
For the revolution
day of the dead
1. yesterday and today i marked playing cards for divination. decorated the cardboard playing card box in duct tape stickers and clear acrylic paint. they predict happiness for me.
2. as long as there are women and colors there will be hope.
3. good combinations: knitting and watching youtube; roses and halloween; orange juice and soymilk; peanut butter and honey; yoga and chocolate. i love the process of domestication i am engaging in. soft wild fur. warm breath of contentment.
4. a friend calls herself a wolf mother. i feel profoundly mammalian recently. i have a new body. i am beginning to look pregnant. i feel like a wolf for the first time in my life.
5. i miss the congo. everyday i look at the photograph that esperanza gave me. she and i and about 6 other women sitting in front of the red cross building in uvira a year ago. i light candles for these ministers wives living in a war zone most of the world ignores.
revolution of the lilies 