Tag: Black Girl Magic

A Letter to my Nieces & Nephews on Ella Baker’s Birthday

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Photo Credit:  NAACP Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

My loves,

One of the greatest Black women poets of our time, Lucille Clifton, is not frequently taught in schools — or at least not taught enough. Her poem, song at midnight, contains a line you may have seen on the internet, in part. We like to circulate it among ourselves as a clarion call, a prayer, a balm & mantra, especially the last lines, but here is the second part of it, from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser:

born into babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

The epigraph to this poem is from a Sonia Sanchez poem: “…do not send me out among strangers.”

Black women’s lives, for so long, were shaped around survival, and it had always been so, it’s true. In The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales told by Virginia Hamilton, in the introduction, though, I was reminded of something else.

“It is amazing,” she writes, “that the former Africans could ever smile and laugh, let alone make up riddles and songs and jokes and tell tales. As slaves, they were forced to live without citizenship, without rights, as property – like horses and cows – belonging to someone else. But no amount of hard labor and suffering could suppress their powers of imagination.”

 

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Notes from the Bronx Book Festival

I wrote about the Bronx Book Festival for the Village Voice and how the Bronx is having a resurgence of the book scene with the work and leadership of Saraceia J. Fennell and Noelle Santos, but there were a couple of quotes from one of the panels that I wanted to add in the spirit of Throwback Thursday that didn’t fit in the context of the story that I wanted to put here.

  • “In this nation, the women’s movement was started by Black women. If we’re going to create a movement in this country that’s inclusive, we have to acknowledge indigenous women who get erased, and Black women specifically. That’s still not understood, which is why we struggle with solidarity. If your movement doesn’t lift all boats, we’re not going to win.”  — Sofia Quintero

 

  • “A large part of resistance is rejecting rejection…Part of the feminist project, especially in the arts, is a more liberating masculinity. It’s not that they don’t have privilege. Our feminism has to be one that heals and liberates everyone. We have to inform the brothers, but the brothers gotta do their own labor.” — Roya Marsh is one of the poets in the beautiful Black Girl Magic anthology, which you can buy here.
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I went a little overboard, but it was the first Bronx Book Festival, so what can I say? These are all Bronx authors, some books I bought from The Lit. Bar tent and a few that were given to attendees, plus my press pass which I will cherish for life.