Wow, it’s been nearly a month since I last posted. So much going on, can’t pick just one, two or three. But there is something I’d like to share, it’s MAKERS. “MAKERS: Women Who Make America” (a production of Storyville Films) is just one part of the story. That’s the complete title of a new mini-series that will premiere on PBS stations February 26.
“MAKERS: Women Who Make America” is a 3-hour overview of the women’s movement in America, it’s key players, and pivital moments from the 1950s to the present day. One can debate who did what, when, where and the impact. For example who really blew the whistle that forced Anita Hill that forced the Senate Judiciary Committee to reopen the confirmation hearing for Clarence Thomas in 1991? Giving total credit to the women in Congress makes for a consistent narrative of women, politics, and power, but the messenger was NPR’s Nina Totenberg. The coverage of the hearing won NPR a George Foster Peabody Award. Anita Hill wrote a book and went back into academia. And Clarence Thomas is Justice for life on the U.S. Supreme Court.
There are great stories told, but 3 hours is insufficient to explore sex, race, class, from so many women’s perspectives and experiences from the last 5 decades. But where MAKERS loses time in broadcast, it more than makes up for with the MAKERS website featuring testimonials from many American “maker” women. The MAKERS website (www.makers.com) is a collaboration between AOL and PBS. Commercial and public media can peacefully coexist, and it makes for a wonderful partnership. The site aims to be the largest video collection of women’s stories. They are contemporary stories even though some of the women featured have joined the ancestors. Thank goodness they didn’t go silently into the night.
Friday, March 1 at 2 PM ET (11 AM PT) I’ll be hosting a social screening of the first hour of the documentary “Makers: Women Who Make America” with two makers:
Barbara Smith is a feminist writer, critic, teacher, and author who co-founded Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher of women of color. Have you read This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (a KP classic). Even used, it’s selling for $92 on Amazon. Barbara Smith is currently serving her second term as a member of the Albany Common Council.
Amy Richards is co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation. She’s written several books including Manifesta, Grassroots and Opting In. She’s also written for major publications including the New York Times, Bitch, The Chicago Tribune, and also has her own “Ask Amy” column on Feminist.com.
You sometimes wonder if it’s possible to have a civil and intelligent conversation about race. And the topic is ever so present in an election year, but much more nuanced when it comes to referring to a particular presidential candidate. It’s a challenge to come out of these discussions without some historical, social and/or political bruises. This weekend during the social screening of the interview with James Baldwin, I asked Ethelbert Miller in the chat, “Do you think we’ll overcome racism in your lifetime?” Ethelbert responded/typed.
No I don’t think it’s something you overcome. I think we all struggle with being good people on a daily basis. We try to be tolerant and understanding. This is what it means to be human.
Phillip Rodriguez, who’s produced numerous documentaries for PBS over the years is taking a shot at a civil and intelligent conversation about race as part of public media’s 2012 election specials. Phillip is from Los Angeles and a visiting fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. We’re punchy friends on certain topics, but I will confidently and without hesitation say he’s a talented filmmaker.
RACE 2012: A Conversation About Race and Politics airs Tuesday, October 16 at 8 PM on PBS stations (check local listings). The conversations are introduced by persons who’ve had these chats before civil and otherwise. But these professionals in academia, communications, and politics allow the documentary to lay some groundwork for a conversation rather than detonate the argument that seems to result in some pretty steady payola for certain on-screen pundits. But either way, the pain remains. Here are a few clips. More are posted on the Race 2012 YouTube Channel.
Elizabeth II is a story of survival on a regal level. Yes, “symbol-tons” gathered around the United Kingdom’s celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee (60 years on the thrown) over the weekend etc. Here is someone who totally comprehends their strengths and limitations as a living symbol and has been willing to tweak (except herself) along the way. Elizabeth II is the longest living British monarch since Queen Victoria. But what may be most remarkable about the Jubilee is authorized by the sitting monarch herself — the online release of Queen Victoria’s journals (www.queenvictoriasjournals.org/home.do). The journals are from the Royal Archives and available online until July 1, 2012. There are 141 volumes total. Typescripts, an edited version by Victoria’s daughter Princess Beatrice, and handwritten versions (in the Queen’s handwriting) can be seen on the site. Hey, you live a long life on the thrown, you get to see and write about a lot of things. Victoria was the first British monarch to celebrate a Diamond Jubilee.
Though the Victoria played by Emily Blunt in “Young Victoria” wanted nothing less than a “perfect” coronation, the real Victoria got anything but…and had to go with the flow —
Poor old Lord Rolle who is 82, and dreadfully infirm, in attempting to ascend the steps, fell and rolled quite down, but was not the least hurt; when he attempted to reascend them, I got up and advanced to the end of the steps, in order to prevent another fall.
The Archbishop came in and ought to have delivered the Orb to me, but I had already got it, and he (as usual) was so confused and puzzled and knew nothing; and – went away. There we waited for some minutes; Lord Melbourne took a glass of wine; the Procession being formed, I replaced my Crown (which I had taken off for a few minutes), took the Orb in my left hand, and the Sceptre in my right, and thus loaded proceeded through the Abbey, which resounded with cheers, to the first Robing-room, where I found the Duchess of Gloucester, Ma., and the Duchess of Cambridge with their ladies. And here we waited for at least an hour, with all my ladies and Train-bearers; the Princesses went away about half an hour before I did; the Archbishop had (most awkwardly) put the ring on the wrong finger, and the consequence was that I had the greatest difficulty to take it off again,- which I at last did with great pain. Lady Fanny, Lady Wilhelmina, and Lady Mary Grimston, looked quite beautiful. At about ½ p.4 I re-entered my carriage, the Crown on my head, and Sceptre and Orb in my hand, and we proceeded the same way as we came – the crowds if possible having increased. The enthusiasm, affection and loyalty was really touching, and I shall ever remember this day as the proudest of my life. I came home at a little after 6,- really not feeling tired.
After reading some of the journals, I happened upon a Huffington Post blog by quilter and author Kyra E. Hicks,Queen Elizabeth II’s Jubilee Gift May Shed Light on Quilt Mystery, Black Studies. Hicks published a children’s book Martha Ann’s Quilt for Queen Victoria (illustrated by Lee Fodi). The book is based on the true story of Martha Ricks whose family purchased their freedom in 1830 and left the United States for a new life in Liberia through the American Colonization Society. In the book Martha Ann watches the British Navy as they patrol the Liberian coast to stop slave catchers from kidnapping women, men and children and forcing them into the slave trade. It becomes Martha Ann’s greatest wish to meet Victoria and present her with a gift fit for the queen. She saves enough money for her passage to England and to present Queen Victoria with what is known as the Coffee Tree Quilt. In a nutshell (see promotional video)
Hicks has confirmed Martha Ricks visit with the queen in the online journals from Princess Beatrice’s copies dated July 16, 1892. Queen Victoria wrote,
“Negress, 76 years of age who had for 50 years longed to see me, & had saved money to do so, walking a long distance to arrange for her departure. At last she came with friends & Mrs. Byden (also coloured) the wife of the very black Liberian Minr. Brought her. The old [sic] was short & very black, with a kind face. I shook hands with her & she kept holding & shaking mine …”
Queen Elizabeth would send the quilt to the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago for display.
The Slavery Abolition Act of Parliament in 1833 abolished slavery in the British Empire (with the exception of a few territories under the control of the East India Company). At Kyra Hick’s suggestion, I did some search on the journal pages with the key word “slavery.” Even before her coronation June 28, 1838, the 18 year-old heir apparent was being briefed by her prime minister, and in other conversations (Melbourne) about “this slavery” as it’s sometimes referred in the journal typed transcripts. But the topic never goes away. After the coronation, the conversation and the Queen’s documentation of it evolves, but from this glance doesn’t give any indication of her own opinion …
“We must seize their ships; that would be a very violent act; and only done with a Nation with whom we have a treaty”, said Lord M. “It would be rather severe to say to a friend”, Lord Melbourne continued, that one great difficulty would be, that if we seized their ships “they will shelter themselves under the Brazilian Flag; well, then we must seize their ships; then they’ll shelter themselves under the Flag of the North American States, with whom we have no treaty, and we must seize their ships; and that wouldn’t be so convenient”; which is very true. Then again they’ll say, Lord M. continued, “We do this to people”(the Portugueze) “because they are weak, what we wouldn’t dare do to those who are more powerful”. We agreed that all this Slave Trade would give us great trouble; that it certainly was a misfortune to find, that all we had done, had rendered it “so much more savage”. Lord M. said he could see, by Wilberforce’s life, that it was constantly preying upon his mind. Spoke of the feeling against Slavery being so much stronger in this country than in any other; he said, some few in France took it up very eagerly; spoke of the feeling of the women in England for it, of the petitions about it signed by so many thousand of females.”
It’s been awhile since the last Eclectique Interview. This will be the second interview with a poet. That’s Sarah Browning, director of D.C. Poets Against the War and Split This Rock Poetry Festival. Sarah is also author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007), and co-editor of D.C. Poets Against the War: An Anthology (Argonne House Press, 2004). She’s an active community organizer and poet (often at the same time). The Split This Rock Poetry Festival is coming up March 22-25, 2012. For 4 days the festival engages poetry as activism in community building, justice and social change. Yes, Virginia, and Maryland and all the states that surround the monumental colony we call, Washington, D.C. – the city is a poetry capital.
SPLIT THIS ROCK POETRY FESTIVAL: POEMS OF PROVOCATION & WITNESS WHAT: Four days of readings, workshops, panels, open mics, youth programs, and activism, bringing poetry into public life and exploring the role of poetry in social change.
WHEN: March 22-25, 2012
WHERE: Washington, DC – Multiple venues in the U Street Corridor and Columbia Heights. Visit the website at www.SplitThisRock.org for details.
E916: What inspired Split This Rock Poetry Festival?
SB: Split This Rock emerged from DC Poets Against the War, part of a national movement founded in response to President Bush’s drive to war with Iraq in 2003. Our local group united poets working in a variety of styles – across differences of race, ethnicity, age, gender, and sexual orientation – to speak out for alternatives to war and for a radical reorganization of our nation’s priorities.
As I discovered when I moved here, DC poets had always written with this clear-eyed. But they did not always have a platform from which to speak these truths. There were few institutions supporting and promoting this kind of poetry, poetry that bears witness to the injustices of the world and, through compelling and powerful language, provokes change.
We designed the first Split This Rock Poetry Festival to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq in March, 2008, and put out the call nationwide for poets and activists and dreamers to join us.
The response was so phenomenal. Hundreds of people from our city, our region, and throughout the country found the festival so necessary, that we went to work building a permanent home for socially engaged poets. In addition to presenting a biennial national festival (which is equal parts festival, conference, and political action), Split This Rock now also presents readings, workshops, and discussion series year-round, publishes poetry of provocation and witness in electronic forums, sponsors an extensive program for youth, including the DC Youth Slam Team, and spearheads campaigns to integrate poetry into public life.
E916: How did poetry become so popular in Washington, DC? What makes DC a poetry or a poetic city?
SB: DC has a long and rich poetic tradition, to which we are all the lucky heirs. Walt Whitman spent the Civil War years in the city and the Harlem Renaissance poetry movement was launched here by Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Jean Toomer, and others. DC was home to influential Black Arts Movement poets Larry Neal, Gaston Neal, and Amos Zu-Bolton, among many others. Essex Hemphill was the best known Black gay poet of that gorgeous generation tragically lost to AIDS, those who came of age in the 1980s.
It’s no coincidence that most of these poets are African American, of course. Our city’s Black writers and artists have always nurtured and supported one another, developing a strong cultural voice that has been critical to the survival of the District’s Black community.
Today is no different. Older poets mentor younger ones, communities of poetry form and dissolve and re-form. DC becomes a living center for oral poetry – the oldest of poetic forms – newly named “Spoken Word.”
The District of course is also home to the federal government, an institution endlessly dissected and analyzed by the press and the popular imagination. Those of us who live here, in contrast, are often forgotten. We claim our place in the world, therefore, with poetry. Here is our story, our poems declare. Pay attention.
E916: When did you become a poet?
SB: I come from a family of poets and English professors, so it took awhile for me to accept that I had no alternative but to be a poet. I was busy differentiating myself by becoming a community organizer. But I discovered that I couldn’t do one without the other. I needed a creative life, a language with which to explore the complexities of the world, my relationship to the society in which I found myself, all the ways that history shapes us and frees us. I was almost 30 before I began calling myself a poet and found a way to put poetry at the center of my life.
With first DC Poets Against the War and now Split This Rock, I have found a way to unite these two commitments, to be a poet and an activist, to be undivided.
E916: Who are you looking forward to seeing at the festival? Give us a few highlights. Who’s coming to the event?
SB: Split This Rock 2012 features a spectacular line-up of poets! DC favorites Sonia Sanchez, Alice Walker, Kim Roberts, Venus Thrash, and Naomi Shihab Nye will be joined by poets new to most of us: Homero Aridjis, a leader of Mexico’s environmental movement; Sherwin Bitsui, a Navajo poet devoted to keeping Navajo language alive among the next generation; spoken word superstars Carlos Andrés Gómez and Rachel McKibbens; Khaled Mattawa, a Libyan who lived in exile in the United States for decades and now divides his time between his home country and the country that gave him asylum for so many years; Douglas Kearney, who’s both a hip hop head and an opera librettist; and more.
We’re also paying tribute to the life and work of poet-activist-essayist-teacher June Jordan during the festival, as 2012 will mark the 10th anniversary of her death. Several sessions will reflect on Jordan’s legacy, focusing on her writings on environmental justice, sexual violence, and creative resistance.
E916: How do we appreciate poem? Does a poem make its best impression when read on the page or read aloud?
SB: When we attend a live reading, we hope that several of our senses will be excited: the language will delight our ear (even if the topic is a difficult one); the music of the poem will tickle our rhythmic sense; and the eye will receive gifts from the poet himself. We also have the pleasure of a live, communal experience, the kind whose magic we know from musical and theatrical performances. We are both alone and in a crowd as we listen and watch.
When reading poetry on the page, on the other hand, we have the pleasure of solitary communion with the poem. We can take all the time we want with it, reread it, read it aloud, yell at it. The eye is the most essential organ to this experience: The poem’s form should inform its meaning. Every mark on the page asks a question, suggests a possible reading. Which is why poets are so meticulous, can struggle for years with a single poem. The possibilities are endless; English in particular has a huge vocabulary compared to many other languages. And so the poet seeks and keeps seeking the language, the form, to carry her vision into the world.
This year’s festival’s tag line is “Poetry by and for the 99%.” When and where does poetry occupy public space?
Poetry is everywhere! Poets have been occupying and occupiers have been writing poetry. A new anthology, Liberty’s Vigil: 99 Poets Among the 99%, has just been published by Michael Czarnecki’s FootHills Publishing. Split This Rock poets have led open mics and given workshops and slept out and marched alongside and been beaten alongside as well. We carry lines of poetry through the streets during demonstrations, we hand out poems, we recite poems into mics.
Yesterday, the cashier at the grocery store was moved to tears when I told him of reading poems in front of his country’s embassy, drawing attention to its repression of poets and activists. I cannot help him go home. I cannot help his family join him here. But on a busy day at Trader Joe’s, we will shake hands, and our tears will tell of the power of words, the essential place of poetry in making a better world.
The tragedy in Oslo is very disturbing. I’m sure many Muslims around the world breathed a sign of relief when Anders Behring Breivik was taken into custody to be charged with the bombing of a government building and the brutal shooting massacre of youth at a state sponsored camp. Terrorism under “God, Christ and country” is terrorism none-the-less. He may not have released weekly videos, but Breivik wrote a “manifesto” titled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. Dare I print it to continue the siege on humanity? Or do we have the right to know? E. Ethelbert Miller wrote on his E-Notes blog:
The problem of the 21st Century is going to be that of religion. Notice how today’s newspapers suddenly seem to have discovered the term Christian extremist. Anders Breivik the person responsible for all the chaos has written a 1,500 page manifesto. We know what he believes – no way we can ignore his narrative. We can’t say the man is crazy. Breivik has a way of looking at the world and he’s not alone. Welcome back Crusades. Why did Breivik target the young people on Utoya island? Here is what one will find reported in The New York Times today:
“Organized by the youth wing of the ruling Labor Party, the camp has become a kind of multicultural incubator in recent years. Many of the victims in Friday’s shooting were the children of immigrants from Africa and Asia who have begun to stake out a greater role for themselves in Norwegian society.”
The above fact is not being widely reported. The last thing we need is a race war too.
I shared this post with Ethelbert, written by Jason Boog at Galley Cat:
In his horrific manuscript, Breivik wrote about different classifications of “traitors,” or individuals he felt could be killed during his imagined revolution. In his handbook, he suggested that revolutionaries consider attacking both “literature conferences and festivals” and “annual gatherings for journalists….”
Breivik had this chilling note about targeting journalists in his manifesto: “in Norway, there is an annual gathering for critical and investigative press where the most notable journalists/editors from all the nations media/news companies attend … The conference lasts for 2 days and is usually organized at a larger hotel/conference center. Security is light or non-existent making the conference a perfect target. ”
Here is the section where he wrote about literary festivals: “This is where many cultural Marxist/PC authors (the disgusting cultural Marxist and traitorous bourgeois elite – the Marxist-Leninists’ of the 68 generation (or sympathisers of this group) meet and socialise. Prioritised target groups make out the bulk of the participants who attend certain literature conferences and festivals: Writers (90%+ of these individuals support multiculturalism and usually portray their world view through their works), editors and journalists in cultural Marxist/multiculturalist publications, [and] a majority of individuals related to various “cultural Marxist/politically correct” cultural settings and organisations.”
Writers beware!
If anyone wishes to read the entire manifesto, they will have to consult Galley Cat and other resources. It will not be posted here. Nor will this blog post the glamor shot of Breivik circulating on the front pages around the globe. Next thing you know, we’ll learn he’s a C.S. Lewis fan.
Should Christians launch their own PR, damage-control spin?
I’m aware of and often feel the hunger to know “why.” There are times we the people get the chance to know especially if the culprit doesn’t fit the profile of the more “usual suspect.”