Ashley La Truly

hammpix: For those of you who don’t understand archaeology, I...

Mon, 20 May 2013 23:34:40 -0400

For those of you who don’t understand archaeology, I have made a diagram.

"Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 23:04:48 -0400

“Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.”

- Alice Walker (via magmotivates)

"Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me"

Mon, 20 May 2013 23:03:20 -0400

“Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me”

- Alice Walker (via howardtuniverse)

"Did you have a genius of a great-great-grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved white..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 23:02:47 -0400

“

Did you have a genius of a great-great-grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved white overseer’s lash? Or was she required to bake biscuits for a lazy backwater tramp, when she cried out in her soul to paint watercolors of sunsets, or the rain falling on the green and peaceful pasturelands? Or was her body broken and forced to bear children (who were more often than not sold away from her)-eight, ten, fifteen, twenty children-when her one joy was the thought of modeling heroic figures of Rebellion, in stone or clay?

How was the creativity of the Black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years Black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a Black person to read or write? And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist. Consider, if you can bear to imagine it, what might have been the result if singing, too, had been forbidden by law. Listen to the voices of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, and Aretha Franklin, among others, and imagine those voices muzzled for life. Then you may begin to comprehend the lives of our “crazy,” “Sainted” mothers and grandmothers. The agony of the lives of women who might have been Poets, Novelists, Essayists, and Short Story Writers, who died with their real gifts stifled within them.

”

- In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South (1974)

"And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 23:00:16 -0400

“And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see—or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.”

- Alice Walker (via unconditionedconsciousness)

Expect Nothing

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:39:58 -0400

words-for-words:

Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise

"Animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:28:21 -0400

“Animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.”

- Alice Walker (via fictivefox)

"I have just about let you play man long enough to find out you ain’t one."

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:28:10 -0400

“I have just about let you play man long enough to find out you ain’t one.”

- Mem, The Third Life of Grange Copeland. (via iwantthisbitchgonenow)

"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it."

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:26:44 -0400

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”

- The Color Purple. Alice Walker (via shutupmeg95)

"Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet."

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:26:39 -0400

“Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.”

- Alice Walker (via volunteer-lawyers-for-justice)

"Even as I hold you, I am letting you go."

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:26:26 -0400

“Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.”

- Alice Walker (via oktoberlyons)

descentintotyranny: Alice Walker - Sister Assata: This Is What...

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:26:05 -0400

descentintotyranny:

Alice Walker - Sister Assata: This Is What American History Looks Like

May 15 2013

I don’t know why, given where we are with dronefare, but I didn’t expect the man making the announcement about Assata Shakur being the first woman “terrorist” to appear on the FBI’s most wanted list to be black. That was a blow. I was reminded of the world of “trackers” we sometimes get glimpses of in history books and old movies on TV. In Australia the tracker who hunts down other aboriginals who have, because of the rape and murder, genocide and enslavement of the indigenous (aboriginal) people, run away into the outback. He shows up again in cowboy and Indian films: jogging along in the hot sun, way ahead of the white men on horseback, bending on his knees to get a better look at a bruised leaf or a bent twig, while they curse and spit and complain about how long he’s taking to come up with a clue. And then there were the “trackers” who helped the pattyrollers during our four hundred years of enslavement. When pattyrollers (or patrols) caught run-away slaves in those days they frequently beat them to death. I’ve often thought of the black men whose expertise at tracking fugitives helped bring these terrors, humiliations and deaths about. When I was younger I would have been in a rage against them; not understanding the reality of invisible coercion, and mind and spirit control, that I do now. Today, only a few years older than Assata Shakur, and marveling at the unenviable state of humanity’s character worldwide, I find I can only pray for all of us. That we should be sinking even below the abysmal standard early “trackers” have set for us: that the US government can now offer two million dollars for the capture of a very small, not young, black woman who was brutally abused, even shot, over three decades ago, as if we don’t need that money to buy people food, clothes, medicine, and decent places to live.

What is most distressing about the times we live in, in my view, is our ever accelerating tolerance for cruelty. Prisoners held indefinitely in orange suits, hooded, chained and on their knees. Like the hunger strikers of Guantanamo, I would certainly prefer death to this. People shot and bombed from planes they never see until it is too late to get up from the table or place the baby under the bed. Poor people terrorized daily, driven insane really, from fear. People on the streets with no food and no place to sleep. People under bridges everywhere you go, holding out their desperate signs: a recent one held by a very young man, perhaps a veteran, under my local bridge: I Want To Live. But nothing seems as cruel to me as this: that our big, muscular, macho country would go after so tiny a woman as Assata who is given sanctuary in a country smaller than many of our states.

The first time I met Assata Shakur we talked for a long time. We were in Havana, where I had gone with a delegation to offer humanitarian aid during Cuba’s “special period” of hunger and despair, and I’d wanted to hear her side of the story from her. She described the incident with the New Jersey Highway Patrol, and assured me she was shot up so badly that even if she’d wanted to, she would not have been able to fire a gun. Though shot in the back (with her arms raised), she managed to live through two years of solitary confinement, in a men’s prison, chained to her bed. Then, in what must surely have been a miraculous coming together of people of courageous compassion, she was helped to escape and to find refuge in Cuba. One of the people who helped Assata escape, a white radical named Marilyn Buck, was kept in prison for thirty years and released only one month before her death from uterine cancer. She was a poet, and I have been reading her book, Inside/Out, Selected Poems, which a friend gave me just last week. There is also a remarkable video of her, shot in prison, that I highly recommend.

This is what solidarity can look like.

The second time I saw Assata, years later, I was in Havana for the Havana Book Fair. Cuba has a very high literacy rate, thanks to the Cuban revolution, and my novel, Meridian, had recently been translated and published there. However, this time we did not talk about the past. We talked about meditation. Seeing her interest, and that of Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly, and others, I decided to offer a class. There under a large tree off a quiet street in Havana, I demonstrated my own practice of meditation to some of the most attentive students I have ever encountered. The mantra: Breathing in: “In,” breathing out: “Peace.”

I believe Assata Shakur to be a good and decent, a kind and compassionate person. True revolutionaries often are. Physically she is beautiful, and her spirit is also. She appears to hold the respect, love and friendship of all the people who surround her. Like Marilyn Buck they have risked much for her freedom, and appear to believe her version of the story as I do.

That she did not wish to live as an imprisoned creature and a slave is understood.

What to do? Since we are not, in fact, helpless. Nor are we ever alone.

I call on the Ancestors
by whose blood
and DNA
we exist
to accompany us
as always
through this lengthening
sorrow.
And to bear witness
within us
to all that we are
aware.

"…the only reason i got married was because it was illegal, i proposed to him!” “did you get down on..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:15:57 -0400

““…the only reason i got married was because it was illegal, i proposed to him!”
“did you get down on one knee?”
“no. i don’t do knees.””

- Alice Walker on Desert Island Discs. Absolute heroine. (via renspitsatmagpies)

nappylikeyopappy: a mini manifesto: threexthree: sonia sanchez

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:35:52 -0400

nappylikeyopappy: a mini manifesto: threexthree: sonia sanchez:

ancestryinprogress:

a blk/woman/speaks

i am deep/blk/soil

they have tried to pollute me

wid a poison called America

they have tried to

scorch my roots

wid dope

they have tried to

drown my dreams wid alcohol

wid too many men who spit

their foam on top of my fruit

til it drops

rotten in…

mauving: if i had known, if i had known you, i would have left my love at home. Sanchezzzzzzzzz.

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:34:58 -0400

mauving:

if i had known, if

i had known you, i would have

left my love at home.

Sanchezzzzzzzzz.

mauving: “And I cried. For myself. For this woman talkin’ about love. For all the women who have...

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:34:38 -0400

mauving:

“And I cried. For myself. For this woman talkin’ about love. For all the women who have ever stretched their bodies out anticipating civilization and finding ruins.”

Sanchez. OG.

"don’t let them die out all these old/blk/people don’t let them cop out with their memories of..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:32:18 -0400

“don’t let them die out
all these old/blk/people
don’t let them cop out
with their memories
of slavery/survival.
it is our
heritage
u know. part/african.
part/negro.
part/slave
sit down with em brotas & sisuhs.
talk to em. listen to their
tales of victories/woes/sorrows.
listen to their black/
myths.
record them talken their ago talk
for our tomorrows.
ask them bout the songs of
births. the herbs
that cured
their aches. the crazy/
niggers blowen
some cracker’s cool.
the lauhter
comen out of tears.
let them tell us of their juju years
so that ours will be that much stronger.”

- sonia sanchez, now poem. for us. (via black-poetry)

"i give myself five days to forget you. on the first day i rust. on the second i wilt. on the third..."

Sat, 18 May 2013 21:31:26 -0400

“i give myself five days to forget you.

on the first day i rust.

on the second i wilt.

on the third day i sit with friends but i think about your tongue.

i clean my room on the fourth day. i clean my body on the fourth day.

i try to replace your scent on the fourth day.

the fifth day, i adorn myself like the mouth of an inmate.

a wedding singer dressed in borrowed gold.

the midas of cheap metal.

tinsel in the middle of summer.

crevice glitter, two days after the party.

i glow the way unwanted things do,

a neon sign that reads;

come, i still taste like someone else’s mouth.”

- Warsan Shire, “Residue” (via lifeinpoetry)

"the coal miners and the atheists the immigrants and the sword swallowers the city boys and the fire..."

Sat, 18 May 2013 21:28:39 -0400

“the coal miners and the atheists

the immigrants and the sword swallowers

the city boys and the fire eaters

the prostitutes and the butchers

the immigrants and the abortionists

the local bar

the rotting tree

the stray dog, derelict car park, empty pram

all uttered gods name

when you walked by.”

- Warsan Shire, “Day Six” (via lifeinpoetry)

"How far have you walked for men who’ve never held your feet in their laps? How often have you..."

Sat, 18 May 2013 21:13:38 -0400

“How far have you walked for men who’ve never held your feet in their laps?
How often have you bartered with bone, only to sell yourself short?
Why do you find the unavailable so alluring?
Where did it begin? what went wrong? And who made you feel so worthless?
If they wanted you, wouldn’t they have chosen you?
All this time, you were begging for love silently, thinking they couldn’t hear you, but they smelt it on you, you must have known that they could taste the desperate on your skin?
And what about the others that would do anything for you, why did you make them love you until you could not stand it?
How are you both of these women, both flighty and needful?
Where did you learn this, to want what does not want you?
Where did you learn this, to leave those that want to stay?”

- Warsan Shire via (via superbunneh)