It’s been 6 weeks since I have been on the blog. I have been watching the state of the world with eyes that want to look away, but can’t. It seems we are on a collision course with hopelessness and destruction, vaccine or no vaccine. Human rights are being violated and lives taken with impunity, due to governmental inaction (India, Brazil, Peru) and governmental action (Colombia, USA, Israel). From patients to protestors, the poor across the world are bearing the brunt of the pandemic’s cost.
It is a year since the murder of George Floyd in the United States, and in Toronto, Regis Korchinski-Paquet. Last year, people overcame their fear of covid19 and took to the streets en masse after a fear-laden set of global lockdowns stopped all social presence in its tracks. Since that time, people have been amassing at numerous events in response to local and international news all over the world.
There have been hundreds of Black and Indigenous and Latino people murdered by police in the last few decades in the U.S. and Canada. To list and say their names would take some time.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/25/how-many-people-have-police-killed-since-george-floyd
In order to honour the memory of George Floyd, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Sandra Bland, and Brionna Taylor, among so many others— I’ve decided to go back to the 1960s, back to amazingly powerful Henry Dumas, taken from us at the age of 33, when he was shot in a case of “mistaken identity” by a New York City Transit Cop.
Henry Dumas 1935-1968
He was born in Sweet Home, Arkansas and spent his childhood in New York City. After serving in the military, he attended Rutgers University and ended up eventually teaching language workshops at Southern Illinois University.
As a Black Power militant and civil rights advocate, his poetry is rooted in the fullness of Black experience; to be a son, a lover, a father, a subject of history. At the time when he was writing the use of the “n” word was as contested as it is today. But for many, writing from the ironic corners of Black America, the use of this noun both underscored the derogatory and the resilient, if not the redemptive. In her recent piece on Henry Dumas, “Some Requiem”, Harmony Holiday says of his work,
“Come, it is time to be born,” Dumas announces in “Pane of Vision.” “Do you remember the sweet pain of turning around?” he asks in “Green Hill, Golden Mountain.” Dumas is always addressing us, as if we’re old friends who have crossed the threshold of bones into the West together and dream of returning to a land we cannot name except by feeling its terrain. He wants us all to turn around in unison. His poems call us toward the fantasy of feeling like our true selves and imagine where we might have to travel to accomplish that, what we will have to risk and forfeit, and then they take us there in simple disguises.
Below I share 3 poems of this great U.S. writer, fighter for Black liberation and historian of the feeling of being Black, in the eyes of White America. In this, he’s been classified as an Utopian poet because he shows us “our true selves …the tenderness and the terror… there is no repudiating him or looking away from his warnings.
These poems are for George, Michael, Tamir, Eric, Brionna, Regis, Sandra, Adam, and so many many others. They are for all of you, who’ve ever been terrified for yourself or your loved ones as they/we/you— live their simple, human lives, in the face of institutional white supremacy and social, political, and economic exclusion.
Kef 24
lay sixteen bales down in front on the plank
let me set and bay at the houndog moon
lay sixteen bales down of the cotton flank
pray with me brothers that the pink
boss dont sweat me too soon
beat my leg in a round nigger peg
lord have mercy on my black pole
lay sixteen bales in the even row
let me sweat and cuss my roustabout tune
lord have mercy on my shrinkin back
let me go with the jesus mule
lay sixteen bales for the warp and loom
beat a nigger down and bury his soul
boss dont sweat me too soon
pray with me brothers that I hold my cool
lord have mercy on this long black leg
let me ride on the jesus mule
lay sixteen bales of white fuzz down
lay sixteen tales of how I got around
lord have mercy on this sweat and stink
lord have mercy
lay sixteen bales
pray brothers
beat down
lord have
let me
lord lord
brothers
the houndog moon
howl jesus,
howl!
Knock on Wood
i go out to totem street
we play
neon monster
and watusi feet
killer sharks chasin behind
we play hide
siren!
and out-run cops
they catch
willie
and me
splittin over fence
they knock
in willie’s head
hole
they kick me watusi
down
for dead
like yesterday
runnin feet in my brain
won’t stop willie lookin blood
beggin me
cut off blackjack pain
so whenever you see me comin
crazy watusi
you call me watusi
i keep a wooden willie
blade and bone out that fence
a high willie da conquieror
listen! up there he talkin
wooden willie got all the sense
i go out to siren street
don’t play no more
me and willie beat a certain beat
aimin wood carvin shadows
sometimes i knock on wood
with fist
me and willie play togetherin
and we don’t miss
Jacob Lawrence,U.S.A, Pool Parlour, 1942
Thought
Love came to me and said:
What do you want of me?
Save me I said, Save me.
Love knelt down beside me
and love said:
If you knew the price
of coming to you,
you would ask nothing
but would give.
Ear to the Ground 
I believe that too many law-enforcers — be they private-property security, community police, prison guards or heavily-armed rapid-response police units — have targeted/acquired such authoritative fields of employment for power-trip reasons (albeit perhaps subconsciously). It’s a profession in which they might get to, for example, storm into suspects’ homes, screaming, with fully-automatic machineguns or handguns drawn, at the homes’ occupants (to “face down!”), all of whom, including infants, can be permanently traumatized from the experience. On some occasions, these ‘law-enforcers’ force their way into the wrong home, altogether. That’s potentially when open-fire can and does occur, followed by wrongful deaths to be “impartially” investigated. Those that do get into such a profession of (potential or actual) physical authority might do some honest soul-searching as to truly why. I believe I would. Problematically, there may be many people who are in such an armed authority capacity that were reared with an irrational distrust or baseless dislike of people of other races.
Additionally, I have noticed after almost 3.5 decades of news consumption that a disturbingly large number of people, however precious their souls, can be considered disposable, even to an otherwise democratic nation. When the young children of those people take notice of this, tragically, they’re vulnerable to begin perceiving themselves as disposable thus without value. When I say this, I primarily have in mind Black and indigenous-nation Americans (and Canadians, though perhaps to a lesser degree). But I know it happens worldwide. To me, it’s like a devaluation, albeit perhaps a subconscious one, of the daily civilian lives lost (“casualties”) in protractedly devastating war zones and sieges. They can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page in the First World’s daily news (to which newspaper owners may say: “It’s just the news business, nothing personal”).
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yes, I think both external and internal factors are at play. but I think young people are both vulnerable to self-internalized racism but also to respond with outrage and awareness. My heart goes out to Darnella Frazier and her small sister who witnessed and recorded the murder of George Floyd. This young woman and child are, like so many, permanently traumatized and altered by this experience. And the daily witnessing on tv and social media for the vast majority of bipoc people is simultaneously triggering, enraging and depressing. Violence is so normal as to be invisible for some.
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