The Social Contract

It's a common thread in the narrative of black and brown people in America.

Bob Herbert's column in the Times today highlights some key points. Police interaction with communities of color, and people of color, cuts to the marrow. It doesn't matter if you're Ivy league educated or the average street negro, all brown boys in America have a story about being pulled over or stopped by cops simply because the color of their skin. It's more than a scene in an Oscar winning film.

Over the weekend, I found that we were still talking about it. Over brunch, another friend expressed her rage as best a poet can, saying simply, 'Am I to believe then, that their blue line is worth more than my blood?' An implied deference to law enforcement, without any accountablity to the people they are sworn to serve and protect seems to violate the social contract. Or should I infer from all of these stories that we were never party to that social contract?

Again, I could put it to rest, but then I came across this in my readings today. From Ross Gay's collection of poems, Against Which,(Cavankerry Press, 2006). I'm hoping he doesn't mind my posting it here. It struck nerves.

Pulled Over in Short Hills, NJ 8:00AM

It's the shivering. When rage grows
hot as an army of red ants and forces
the mind to quiet the body, the quakes
emerge, sometimes just the knees,
but, at worst, through hips, chest, neck,
until, like a virus, slipping inside the lungs
and pulse, every ounce of strength tapped
to squeeze words from my taut lips,
his eyes scanning my car's insides, my eyes,
my license, and as I answer the questions
3, 4, 5 times, my jaw tight as a vice,
his hands massaging the gun butt, I
imagine things I don't want to
and inside beg this to end
before the shiver catches my
hands, and he sees,
and something happens.

Copyright © 2006 by Ross Gay

NaPoWriMo - Catch Up/Day 22

Ok, so I'm behind. I decided that I actually should follow a prompt. Day 22's prompt from Robert Lee Brewer was to write a poem that involves work. Below is my attempt.

Kid A-Draft

To say, It is what it is, signals defeat. Acceptance doesn’t always set you free
and the heavy stone pressing on your heart each day
as you waddle up the slope of the Fulton Street station
doesn’t make the day go any faster. The fluorescent lights
blind. You are an island in a sea of grey cabinets.
You think, this is what it must have been like for Mrs. Basil
E. Frankeweiler. Mixed up files, yellowing papers, and mildew.
The worn adhesive on a file label wedges itself between papers
Unaware of their original intent. Who knew recycling could feel so liberating?
Letting go gets easier, but the paper still bites
Its cut burns the skin worse than rubbing alcohol
and your mother warned you never to bite your cuticles.
Your underexposed pieces are the most sensitive. What gives?
New skin should be protected if only for a while.
You wait for something to happen.
Make copies. Answer phones. Someone on the other line
is asking you to come home.
###

Filing and copying as a task always makes me think of Radiohead's Kid A. I have no other explanations to give.

NaPoWriMo- Day 9

I'm trying to keep up with my oh so cool, way too talented poet friends who are posting new poems for NaPoWriMo. Naturally, I'm behind. I'm working on a much longer project of my own. Anyway, in today's freewrite, I wrote something that may be a poem, or it may want to be a short story. Hat tip to Mom and her very oddball stream of consciousness rationalizations.

THE TRUTH ABOUT MY GRANDFATHER - DRAFT

Your life is still mystery. There’s a tape that repeats in your head
and it misses all the details I’d like to know. How it felt
to jump so high and land on your feet for the first time.
The starch and itch of a white shirt around the collar of your neck.
The honeysuckle and freesia perfumed air just an hour before dusk
and the dark wet smell of boiled water for laundry. The bitter and syrupy flavor
of molasses on a dry biscuit on your tongue, grateful for the meal
and treat all in one. How blood tasted like dirt and rocks in the crack
of your bottom lip when you folded inside your mouth to suck it dry
after the old man slapped you quiet. How your hands were sore
and scarred from splitting cotton blossoms from the field. The facts of your life
are in all these things too. But you don’t let us in. The South is fantasy
in wistful reflections inside gravelly voices. Those were the good ol days.
Days so good that you remind us often, of how so many of you took
I94 north from the heat and burn of tyranny and indifference. You left everything
you knew to be remade in America, the beautiful. The bountiful. Followed the road
to factories, steel mills and car plants. You were going to do so much better
than your parents. Make your own way in the world, working harder than
the liliest of white hands next to your mashing metal into the frames of vehicles.
Until they closed the plant and the wealth didn’t trickle down but became
pounds of unnaturally colored surplus cheese. I see you now, every Sunday
steadfast in the belief that the everlasting arms will hold you up and shower
you with answers a cruel world never revealed. Something greater than
the force of will that brought you north in the first place to tell you
a secret you should’ve known all along. You do belong and you are loved.

NaPoWriMo - Photo of the Day

Poems, poems. Why do you elude me? As promised, a meager photo substitute.

The quote: 'The Wanderer is overcome by the joy of existence, so that he can only laugh.' - Buddha

From my travel journal on August 18, 2002.

How's that for a writing prompt?

photo: © syreeta mcfadden 2009

NaPoWriMo

Is not a car. Is not a pair of jeans, or a new band. It is the acronym for National Poetry Month. Beginning every April and for the remainder of 29 days, NaPoWriMo encourages all of us, rock star poets to the general population to write poems. One poem every day.

And don't you think there is no better time than now to write poems? The writing and reading of poems, at least for me, has always proven instructive. It compels me to give pause to a hurried lifestyle, where I miss things like silence, grace, beauty, and reflection. When I was growing up, my grandmother gave me poems to read as shorthand to unravel my conflicting emotions. I don't think I would've survived my teens without the quiet, defiant confidence I got from Invictus. Or hold the contradictions of being an individual and a world citizen without If. And if she hadn't primed me, I don't think I would've felt exhilarated when I read Canonization, and ultimately realizing that those metaphysical poets I studied my senior year were really masters at seduction. Ah, John Donne, you had me at 'let me love.'

I'm going to try to meet this challenge and post a poem a day. We'll see how I do. And if the words don't come, I'll substitute with a photograph. Because sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

photo: © syreeta mcfadden 2009

Things to Look Forward to in 2009

For Starters:

1. January 20, 2009
2. Elizabeth Alexander's poem for the inauguration
3. Robert Downey, Jr. and Jamie Foxx in the Soloist
4. Literary debut of The Other Side of Paradise by Staceyann Chin
5. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
6. Mad Men Season 3!