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Recently, I took the mic for a public poetry reading. It was my first time, maybe ever, reading my verses to a live audience. (Subscribers, scroll down to hear the full, 5-minute audio clip.) I gathered my courage along with a handful of short pieces, one pulled from my writing backlog, the others excerpted from my docupoem project, JOURNEY(S). I was grateful for the reception of my work, which was overwhelmingly positive. However, before, during and after the reading, I couldn’t help but scrutinize the significance of my words.
It was maybe a few weeks back when I expressed these doubts to a fellow writer. “I feel like I’m still in adornment-mode,” I told her. By this I was referring to a piece of critical commentary that writer-activist Toni Cade Bambara, once offered poet Nikky Finney. "So—you can write pretty," Bambara challenged the then-21-year-old Finney, during a monthly writing circle she hosted at her Atlanta home. “What else can your words do besides adorn?"
For Finney, who would go on to win a National Book Award, the call-to-action changed the course of her writing career. She began to move toward a practice that would provoke “her words to do more than pearl and decorate the page … beyond adornment … a writing life rooted in empathetic engagement and human reciprocity.” The kind of life that “Bambara lived and taught.”
I know Bambara for a couple of reasons. A few years back I was invited to discuss my own work in the context of another Bambara quote about writing as resistance. I remember participating in a lively dialogue alongside brilliant Black women doing rigorous research and documentation, but personally, I felt a sense of impostor syndrome and never got closure from that event. The core question regarding a writer’s individual responsibility continued to haunt me.
Today, Bambara stares up at me from the cover of the 1970 anthology, The Black Woman, which she edited and has essays featured in as well. Her gaze is both comforting and probing. She sits on the floor of a blank backdrop, her ankles-crossed, eyes askance, with one hand on her chin, as if passing her inquiry of Finney onto me.
One of the works included in the anthology was “On the Issue of Roles,” an essay excerpted from an autobiographical essay Bambara wrote and delivered as a lecture at Livingstone College for the 1969 “Black Woman’s Seminar.” The text captures Bambara’s fervent belief that “‘human nature’ is a pretty malleable quality.” But, she believed, that the Black community, especially, has been “so turned around by western models, we don’t even know how to raise the correct questions.” Therefore, the situation we find ourselves in demands a “shifting of priorities” that centers an interrogation of both “Selfhood” and “Blackhood.”
The way “you find your Self,” Bambara instructed, is by “destroying illusions, smashing myths … being responsible to some truth. That entails at the very least cracking through the veneer” of society’s prescribed definitions, which are indistinguishable from our own. It requires breaking free from fallacies and deconstructing our programming. In this context, the usage of veneer seems almost a stand-in for adornment.
Even as I’m writing this, my words spread like warm butter across my belly, just sitting there without melting into my skin. Without sinking in. I have to ask myself again and again, what are my words doing for me, truly? For the world? What function do they serve beyond sounding pretty? Is it possible, I wonder, for words to agitate without acrimony? What am I doing, if only placidly observing the starry spectacle of being, Being, BEING? Is that enough? And, what does it even mean in writing?
“Revolution begins with the self, in the self.” For Bambara, there was no avoiding this. And, movement must be meaningful, actionable, not just surface or aspirational, because as she so plainly and painfully put it, “Mouth don’t win the war.”
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