Populations around the world today suffer considerable anxiety at the hands of rulers who exercise power at the expense of the governed. Whatever stability of the global order appeared to be regnant in the aftermath of WWII—between 1945 and the rearrangements of power that roiled the colonial synthesis across Africa, […]
Image Credit: Torkwase Dyson, Black Interiority, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 120. Courtesy of the artist. The scene of writing has become for me a scene of hurting. As an African American woman, as a Muslim, as the single mother of a teenaged Muslim black boy, as a black […]
By the time James Baldwin took the stage at the University of Chicago in May 1963 to speak on the subject of “The Moral (or Social) Responsibility of the Artist,” an impatient authority was immediately discernible. This recently unearthed recording of the novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet, reveals a weary […]
On December 6, 2017, a coalition of women Democrats led by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand—Senators Kamala Harris, Claire McCaskill, Patty Murray, Mazie Hirono, Tammy Baldwin, and Maggie Hassan—demanded that Al Franken give up his senatorial seat as a result of sexual misconduct accusations from eight different women.1 One day later, Franken […]
Image Credit: Satch Hoyt, Hair Combing Cycle 1530, performed by Ensortijadas Colombianas, performance presented at the Museo La Tertulia, Cali, Colombia. Photo Credit: Marie Helene Pereira, August 2017, courtesy of RAW Material Company. Prelude: Victoria Santa Cruz Me Gritaron Negra! Negra Soy! They yelled at me: Black! Black I am. […]
As a poet and essayist, I think of poetry as creative heuristics, a means to investigate the world and experience through language, community, identity and politics. In poetry, writer and reader engage the contents of our categorical thinking, formally and informally (in custom and usage), as well as the limits, […]
“It is not a matter of governing; still less of being governed.” Marcel Havrenne Hannah Arendt reminds us that “…to the Greeks, private life seemed ‘idiotic’ because it lacked the diversity that comes with speaking about something and thus the experience of how things really function in the world” (Arendt […]
Image Credit: Thomas Nast, The Third-Term Panic, Harper’s Magazine, 7 November, 1874. Though it would be hard to say in a single sentence, let me try to understand this: shortly before the holidays, Politico reported that a rogue band of Republican Congressmen had been convening under cover of darkness for […]
Once as a girl, she dreamed an urban kingdom. In the time of the dream, women of the kingdom were squatting over toilets, over gold chamberpots. There was one man—he was understood as the king—in all the imagined city. And this “king” walked among the women and among the pots. […]
PART IV: VISIONS IN HISTORY This town’s edge, a collapsing shore, seems always to be where live the poor. In my mother’s time, they called us river rats,/ now the words mix insults/ of race, stones on our tongues we spit at others. * * * * * History’s latest […]
The Enchantment of BeingFebruary 6, 2018
“Like Rain, Like Thunder, Like Lightning, Like Fire”February 6, 2018
In the Crawlspace: Hill, Franken, and #MeToo PainFebruary 6, 2018
Symphony of CombsFebruary 6, 2018