Editor’s Note: The following article is excerpted from a conversation with publisher Joe Sims.
We writers have a passionate love affair with words – words that quite often don’t just get on the page but [actually] jump out at you. Many of us learn to take these words and examine them. We toss them up and throw them out at the populace with what I call great humility. The more education and political information we’ve acquired causes people sometimes to tend to be arrogant with their words and with the language, assuming sometimes that “the people” will not understand, when the reason “the people” have survived is because they indeed do understand language. They understand both the language given them and the language they’ve survived with and by.
Once I heard a person speak who said, “bring it down to the people.” I disagree with that. We need to go back and remember how we spoke growing up – how our parents spoke, how preachers spoke, how people spoke period. We need to remember that the language we communicated with each other with was rich and fascinatingly rough but at the same time had so much meaning. One must have an appreciation of what language says and does. Sometimes we have to rearrange it to make it much more interesting and if we have a passion for it, we’ll make people have a passion for it also.
When I first started to write poetry, I was also learning how to read it aloud in order to get an audience. Initially some of us would use curse words to get people to listen. After they started listening we never used another curse. One of the things I have understood is that people are not hypocritical about language. When you come to them with language that is rough, they retain a memory of it. Once, when reading a poem to homeless women about a mother who takes her child into a crack house, one of the sisters said, “Hey Maria, that’s just like Jean, ain’t it?”
I wanted to break down and cry. But writing makes me strong: it keeps me grounded and rooted. The thing about reading to people is that we meet in an arena that says, “Yes, people have conspired to make us less than human, but let us continue to be human.”
When you identify inhumanity and the causes that lie between the spaces – I don’t have to spell it out – but if you look between the spaces and the silences, you will understand the reasons why that woman did that. I said to them, “Let us lean back reflect, and say, This is something I cannot do to my children. Let us learn from this kind of inhumanity how the world is made inhumane and how to always stay on that road toward humanity, to always walk upright.”
In a way, you touch people and heal them with your words: these words we use do heal. I get letters from people who say, “I am alive today because I found your book at a time when I needed to.” Then you look up and realize why you are doing this.
In the 1970s, the New York Times asked James Baldwin if there was any such thing as a Black language. Baldwin replied, “Of course there is.” He said, “Now that we have to speak it, you are angry and want to denigrate it.” He continued, “But you taught it to us incorrectly, and we had to survive. We did the best we could by taking this language and twisting and turning and pulling it and coming out with a language all our own. Your language would be dead, if it were not for this Black English.”
It’s always amazing to me that to this day people don’t really believe we have the ability to even write, to even deal with language properly. I remember I had written something once and in the course of the question and answer period someone said, “Did you know…?” I said, “Yeah, but I wrote it in this fashion because that’s the language of the person who was speaking.” She said, “Oh, oh.”
It’s always, “Let me correct your language.” I said to her, “We don’t need correction. We need you to listen and understand the beauty of this language.”
Sometimes I see writers speaking down to people. They think because people are working class, because people are from the streets that they need to keep using only their language. I think that the true writer – the true political writer – understands that you might need to do some of that, but you also at some point need to take people to another place. It is incumbent on us to say, “I acknowledge that, but I also acknowledge other words.”
I’m speaking about this in terms of my own experience. I did a book called A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women. It’s a long semi-autobiographical poem. It was a lyrical poem. Before reading it I prepared the audience. I began to talk. I said, “I’m going to need 20 minutes. I’m going to ask for your undivided attention. I’m going to come with language, and I chose some words that you might not know. Let me translate the words for you.” I continued, “I am going to tell you that this section is about the following. And I want you just to listen to the language. And if need be, if a word hits you that’s beautiful, write it down.”
I was teaching from a platform, teaching people how to listen to this thing called poetry. But this poem, this book, took me to another place, but it also took my audience with me. [I said to them], “let’s listen to the story because we might have a similar story.” It was about this person who had moved from the South, and the movement into high schools and universities and politics. As I was doing this, I was tuning their ears.
I might be somewhere doing a reading, and see people just change. Quite often it’s understood it is theater. You comprehend how much Bertolt Brecht really understood about the theater. How, when artists are up at the podium, an audience can be made to understand the possibilities about themselves.
If you have a vision about work or about the world, it is incumbent upon you as a writer to say, “[We’ve done this for awhile]. Now we must turn a corner and go some place else.”
Someone said to me in an interview, “You don’t write the way you used to.” I said, “You’re right. I shouldn’t write the way I used to. If I did, then I would show no growth.” I said, “We have great people like the W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois who showed us that as you get more information, you change and evolve.”
This country would have you believe that if you change there’s something wrong. I say, you change you stay alive; you evolve you stay alive. You’re saying to the world, “I have more information now.” It’s not that I’m dissatisfied or that I refute what I did before, because I think that what you do is part of who you are as you advance, and people need to see that.
You started there and now you here. You don’t have to apologize for who you are – your history and herstory.
I remember the first time I talked about going to Cuba there was a tension in the audience. [In this situation] what I try to do is a poem where you just leave it in: it’s natural. They might ask in the question and answer session about it. But the point is to use language in such a way that you are bring people into your arena. You also bring the humanity of people into the arena who have been presented as not being human: people like Fidel or Lumumba.
When you see the movie Lumumba now, you reflect on how back then we said the CIA had killed Lumumba. But when you said this before people just stared at you. However, once you put it out there, people remember. I have had people say to me, “I’ve seen the movie Lumumba and I remember what you and others were saying 30 years ago.” When this happens you don’t say, “I told you so.” Rather you reply, “Yeah, isn’t that something,” and allow them to bask in their discovery.
Writers and activists must understand that you have to wait for people sometimes. One has to have an enormous patience because the people are so bombarded and what you are saying is always limited. You don’t get the press you should with the consequence that it takes people time to catch up. It’s the same with language.
I remember [an occasion] when some people wanted to organize an event and put out a leaflet full of the language of revolution. I told them, “Don’t do that. No one will want to come.” I said, “You have to use a different language” They said, “No, no, no.” And no one came because people preserve themselves. However if you have something very human on stage, people will come.
I tell political people and myself that we must use human language. We also must be human. Once I did a reading in Philadelphia and people came from the community who had never before been at that site. One of the things I like to do when I finish reading is to join hands. Well, the people who had invited me were too “hip,” too “political.” One white man present literally dropped his hands and the people from the community saw that. I wanted to say, “You’re so dumb. You don’t understand. You don’t get it, because the people do see.”
What I’m trying to say to an audience in my work is we become human by understanding that if someone comes to us in a wrong fashion, we’ve got to be able to say, “Excuse me. What did I do to harm you? Help me with this.” At one time a young brother told me, “You can do that because you’re older.” I said, “Yes, but people my age talk about people – it’s not an age thing.” He replied, “What if they think I’m a punk?” I said, “My brother if someone thinks you’re a punk, they’ll think you’re a punk anyway. Do not talk against each other. Do not gossip against each other. Do not take your tongue and curl it against anybody.” He then said, “That’s too hard to do.” I answered, “The easiest thing to do is to destroy someone. If you have a toxic tongue, then you have toxins in your body. It means that if you destroy with your tongue, you can kill somebody.” I told him, “We already have toxins coming out of the White House and the Middle East with people saying, ‘I’m correct or my God is correct.’” A judge in Alabama insists, “I’ve got a right to bring religion into this courtroom.”
You have to ask why are we not really discussing this? You go into a Black church and someone is talking against gays and we sit there and not say a word. I can’t do that. I’ve been not invited to some churches, because I will say, “I thought this was a holy place.” You have to keep people correct: ministers, pastors, teachers of children.
Coming full circle about language, what I’ve learned is that there’s no easy language. There’s no easy way to look at language because language is very complex and seductive. It will seduce you if you’re always writing in the same fashion. People will seduce you too and make you repeat yourself and repeat yourself. I always tell young people they have to be willing to break with applause and not allow it to tell you what you should or should not write.
The same thing is true regarding life: be willing to come with explanations people don’t want to hear in the same way you come with language they really don’t want to hear. What you’ve got to do is say, “I’m coming up with something new, I’m playing with this now. I’m not quite sure where I’m going with it, but I’ve been thinking about this. Let us speak about this together.” In this way people are brought into a conversation.
I’m presently writing an essay on memory. I’ve noticed some of us African Americans are so at peace with the memory of slavery, being disenfranchised and all the pain this country has caused us. It’s familiar, so in a sense, it’s comforting.
What I’m trying to say in this essay is how do I finally say good bye to that memory? How do I stop and say, “OK, that really did happen. How can I get to this 21st century and just acknowledge it without going back and wallowing in it and staying there?” This [problem of staying in the past] means in a sense we are not dealing with what is going on in the continent of Africa; or New York City and the difficulty for some people to even find a place to live. We’re not dealing with what’s going on in the churches; we’re not dealing with our children. While we are dealing with advancing our careers, we’re not dealing with the fact that an entire generation might be lost. We cannot afford to lose an entire generation: Black, white, Asian, Brown, whatever.
You can’t deal with that if you have people constantly in the past because there’s a present and a future. What we need right now are people who use language that talks about the future with a vision. Someone said to me, “You’re being so optimistic.” It has nothing to do with optimism. It has to do with being able to see a way. It’s a long laborious path but I can see people finally with a way – with a way!
We have some of the most advanced people who can see things. I’m not talking about intellectuals only seeing the truth. I’m talking about people who have experienced things in this country. Younger people are putting it together and looking at what is going on. That’s finally what I’m talking about. And to make use of words to do all that is a joy. I couldn’t figure out how to do it any other way. We all need words, but I’m saying you should be able to pull up language sometimes that will say it in the way that other people see exactly how to get to it, or how to see a way, or how to see the beauty in themselves.
I think it is important for a lot of political people to understand – I said this once at a poetry reading and people looked at me – if you only deal with ideology you will die. If you only deal with ideology your organization will die. If you only deal with ideology then at some point you will not understand things and begin to fight and destroy yourselves. Grenada was a fine example of taking hard lines on ideology and not understanding that if you don’t have the art that comes along with, if you don’t have the cultural things, you will kill each other. And lo and behold it happened.
[Regarding culture] the left and even a lot of Black groups will say, “Let’s have a culture night.” And that would be it and most of the people who were political wouldn’t even come. They left it to the people to go and be happy at culture night. They didn’t even understand what was going on there. They didn’t know how to weave it in and make people understand that this culture is the thing that keeps us human as we do this work. We’d sit there for so long and when you got up to read the political people would walk out. I’d say, “Where are you going? Don’t you understand how closely we are connected at this point? Your speech and this poem are connected.” People would turn around and say, “What is she talking about?”
Imagine all the songs we sing that inspire people to continue, but we push it to the side. It’s as if it’s thought, “We’ll entertain the people and then give them the real thing.”
[On the other hand,] this country has learned how to strip culture, take it and use it. It doesn’t stay in power by being dumb. We can call Bush dumb, but he’s not running the bloody thing at all. I used to say, “Culture is the consciousness of the people.” They have taken over our culture and made the people unconscious.
Look at what they used culture for the Iraq war; look at the artists who sang those supposedly patriotic songs. Look at how they tried to use poets too. But they couldn’t use the political ones wise enough to say no to an easy patriotism We know that patriotism is finer and has a deeper resonance than that.
