Edwidge Dandicat

"When everything goes wrong, you see some bad
I'm just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood." -Common

While most students hated reading "Krik, Krak" in high school, I loved it. I loved every page of that book, so much that even with my busy schedule, I want to revisit it. I've gone through 123 pages of "Brother, I'm Dying," for class in one day-- and typically it would be tiresome to read that many pages through and through, but Dandicat is different. She speaks so purely about Haiti and it so purely makes me think about my own history, makes me think about my family-- how we're viewed and how hard my parents work, makes me think about young soldiers through and through, makes me ponder Viet Nam. She, Terrance Hayes, Ayn Rand, Toni Morrison, Dave Eggers-- there are so few writers I've come across who speak a relatable or pure language-- but some writers are simply amazing.

But Dandicat and CCOR facilitator training has made me think so much about family, so much about poverty, so much about the relationship between poverty and national service and how there were so many young young young young young African American and Hispanic soldiers in Viet Nam, average age 19, can you believe it? 19. And they're still doing that, recruiting kids who have "no futures" and "aren't going to college," giving them guns because there's nothing like giving a boy who's grown up powerless a gun, telling him to go risk his life, telling him to kill others.I'm so cynical because the concept makes me sad. How minority people are always fighting here, fighting for respect when we work harder than white people for it, always fighting to get a fair chance, fighting to maintain values that are sacred to our cultures, fighting for our children to have more opportunities, fighting the nostalgia for our motherland, fighting White America's war, fighting back tears when our sons come back dead. I don't know anyone personally who has died in Iraq and Afghanistan, I know plenty of relatives who died in Viet Nam, but they are distant relatives, yet still I always imagine what those dreaded words would be like to hear. There's nothing quite like a soldier. There's nothing comparable to a soldier's family. There's nothing like the results of war... but I wouldn't be here if it weren't for war.

So, when I read Dandicat, I feel for Haiti and I relate it back to Viet Nam. My grandmother is intensely strong, my parents are the most dedicated and hardworking of people-- they are stronger than I can imagine, and I'd like to think that I am strong and my brother is strong too... but still, even as privileged as I am, here in America, being my color and loving so intensely the people that I love, the people that America doesn't give a fair chance to, I'm still fighting.

---

I'm in a good place, a place where my thoughts are clear and I can think about Dandicat and Hayes etc. I'm in a place where I really appreciate family and friends. So, it may sound harsh but I'm in a place where I'm not tolerant of drama and I think people should smile and greet each others when we walk and not to take every moment so seriously. Soldiers die at 19 every darn day. Live for today, tomorrow's not promised, love now, appreciate each other now-- I get angry when people are so consumed with the meanings of everything and people go into any kind of relationship expecting this, that, and the third-- those things are earned through an emotional connection over time. I don't know what to think when people expect me to lay my heart on the line.

Maybe I'm inhumane or what not but it's about reciprocity in joy and emotions, it's about give and take, benefits and costs-- it's not about hating or loving someone and jumping in the pool immediately or the idea of being in love with being in love. One has but one heart, but the pattern of people not getting that idea and being upset over it is nothing new to me. I can be empathetic to a certain extent but after a while, I question why people expect me to hand a piece of myself over to them as though I were a commodity or a piece of cake. There's a difference between being an emotionless, uncaring person and one who knows today's joy as well as future realities. I care dearly about people who are long gone, but I don't dwell. Drama is old to me, share your pain, share your love, breathe, address issues, talk, appreciate yourself, appreciate others, appreciate today.

Sentimental

"If you play, you play for keeps." -Rihanna

Discussions over the past week have revolved around the fact why I am not sentimental.
I believe in casual sex.
I don't cry over people.
I don't believe in marriage.
I live to make myself happy.
And my standards don't necessarily revolve around someone being a good person, but they're higher (ala picky) and more shallow than that.
To an extent I'm so realistic, practical and emotionless. Or I'm extremely picky about who I show emotions to. Let's talk about the hierarchy of the people in my life again (or the people in anyone's life). And let's understand that emotions aren't things handed out. Or merely the fact that not everyone is the "spill my pain to the world, let's always talk about my FEELINGS, kind of person." Like several wise men once said, "only you can know how you feel, so keep your feelings to yourself." I certainly don't care how most people feel and I certainly don't expect most people to care how I feel, so the in-group is selective, and to an extent special, and life is practical. Maybe sometimes I think that people are trying to forge emotional connections too much... or maybe it's just me, being a little cynical about the idea of human relationships. Rough drafts of "Yearning for my Vanity" and "To the Ones You Come With" for Adrian Blevins' class. I think they stand on their own quite well.

---

Yearning for my Vanity

Vanity vanished
when she heard
the turbulence--
when the
sweltering sun
made sweat seep
from her cool figurine
body—
when they
exhumed the fresh corpse
of her lover
who was still
warm with color
into a
powdery, marble soil.

She vanished when
shades of pink and
brown and tan make-up
began melting too.
And her face
became subdued
like the indigo blue
of amnesia
after the drone of
salty tears.

When the heart
was once
pink and plastic
like the young coy
splendid boy toy—

And when it once
ignored reality
to explore
a naïve lovely
existence in a world
with just them.

But now the
decayed memory
keeps taunting
over and over

And Vanity is infested —
like the goddamn steel
that slaughtered
his blood flow.

And if he were not
in the urn
it would have been
like the ways
those disgusting worms
would have
invaded
his masculine flesh
and squirmed inside
his large eager eyes—

with no consideration
for the temple where
his soul
made a home.

guess, Reality was
displeased
that Vanity
flaunted Joy
when everything else
was fucked up—
when
everyone else
was longing

for a break from
being overexposed
to Reality too--
leaving Reality
much confused.

And in its blind
fury,
it took he and her
Vanity away
and left behind
my bones, my flesh, my zombie.
--

To the ones you come home with

To the ones you come home with
because your passion baby
would drive you crazy and
literally, don’t fall for the dick
that is
the James Brown brotha, fly as hell, moving his body better than tongue tactics.

Mix in some rum and let the hip-hop
beat away your consciousness
‘til he’s the pharaoh and you’re the snake fondling in
ecstasy

and it could all be lovely until the heathen’s got you heaving from the poison
he’s poured all over your volition

‘til his rhythmic pulsations got you on the verge of withering,
and his red and blue Nikes
kicks in the ammunition to your soul—slow it down,
it’s just a thought.

It’s got you cringing
ren-dering
helpless—at the sight of him.

You, Mrs. Woman,
will not gush at his Eden
will not pray at his podium
will not marvel at his seduction
will not froth at his creation

will be the one who leaves him—
questioning
why the average brotha is the one you chose
to come home with.

Politeness

"I'm a pleasure seeker shopping for a new distraction" -B-52's

Strength
Intelligence
Passionate
Argument

Except for the smallest sectors, this does not exist at Colby. Colby is about pleasantness and getting along and politeness. Colby is about thesis arguments stated in beautiful debate language and no one feels the need to take a stance because everyone in dominant culture has been ingrained to think a certain way, and everyone is polite to the point where people are fake.

They come here to get by but their feelings aren't visceral, they don't have to be, because day by day, that's how they get along, why not be polite when there is no adversity? Why take a stance? Maybe because I'm colored, I'm radical or am becoming more radical by the second when it comes to the resistance and blindness surrounding race relations.

But I see the few people here who are SO strong, who 2 years ago, I would have thought were leftist but today I see their outspokenness and their strength and I am in complete awe. I'm in complete awe of the kids who make it here who aren't rich-- and white. I'm in awe of the people who speak to people here as if they were people and not just the "intellectual"/ "shallow" community, in awe of people who speak to one another in a language people can understand.

I'm in awe of people who know how to scream, people who can write angry poems, people who can cry, and people who embrace themselves entirely.

"They all talk fast but they all think slow." -Mos Def.

Here, it's all about the niche-- the niche that I'm finding and will continue to meander into, of exceptions and realness. Because, as always, to be honest, 85 percent of the people here are so indignant and pretentious and has such a stick up their privileged, blind, uncultured, rhythm-less asses that, I just don't feel any need to deal with them or any interest in their personalities. But I'm starting to love Colby because among all this whiteness, I stand out and I'm discovering me a little more.

----

Like how doing homework at 3 in the morning is still pathetic but so much more calming this year than the past two years. Because I'm growing and understanding more of who I am. If I were to get frustrated, it certainly won't be at the kids like me who are indoctrinated into this crazy world of privileged college and working our asses off just to enjoy it as much as we can-- deal with it how we can. The ignorance is overwhelming, the lack of community is overwhelming, but I've just learned to block it out and not waste so much energy hating on the white kid who sits in his room protecting himself and his sense of worth from adversity and diverse point of views.

When one reaches Junior year, with technically only senior year left after December, she no-longer searches for love or lust but just for her sense of self and niche here. In some instances I think girls with a trail of relationships are so lucky, because of experience, because they get a sense of what healthy and unhealthy relationships look like instead of a trail of mere dances, make-outs and hook-ups. But then, I often don't envy them and their trail of relationships, their trail of men. I guess I'm at the traditional theory that these things are supposed to sacred and that throughout one's life, she only acquires a few "wows", so hold onto them. Certainly I've only acquired a few "wows", 3 at most, but more realistically two.

I'm juxtaposing my position. I don't believe in monogamy at all. I don't believe that I would be able to stay with one person or marry one person-- plus I think marriage is a farce. I don't mind that people hook-up (or I hook-up), I don't mind that people kiss. But to put myself in a relationship with someone I'm not emotionally connected to, someone I'm not wowed by, if I have to force that, if there wasn't admiration from my part instantaneously about one's character or integrity or eloquence or intelligence, then it's futile. Emotions, more so than relationships or any of that bullshit, is sacred and not to be completely stuck-up but they're not meant to be shared with people who aren't worth it.

Not a very polite post.

Terrance Hayes

"I can't hold onto-- very long,
forgive me pretty baby, I always take the long way home." -Norah Jones

I adore how Terrance Hayes' writes. Adrian Blevins says I'm in a zone of conflict, straddling between lyric poetry and spoken word --- so true. But the last few poems:





----

Fulfilling

The strawberry cocoa puff parfait is you.
Remember the flapper dresses draped over movie stars
hauntingly thin
yet beautiful?
And their lips caress over the comforting colored cigar
so lungs can be filled when only the pretty curtain hangs over
the vulnerable lonely
because the vulnerable pretty – is too lovely to sob?

I am not strong like the stoic ladies with red lips and sultry voices.
When I inhale it,
I cough you out
instead hold you in.
They ossify their nostalgia into rungs of beauty and wisdom
and I
sob it out singing my nostalgia blues –

to feel my lungs fresh but green—
and I can’t sense where my kidneys are because I
haven’t had enough drinks to have hell hit.
I am too innocent.

So the strawberries taste like your lips.
And the chocolate, sweet like the stubble of your beard.
And the vanilla yogurt is your energy
vesseling through me
like blood.

For I would be dead if I were deprived of the lonesome platelets that run through my fingers
or allow my tongue the bitter embrace
and my throat the brute strength to swallow a sorrow it can’t purge.

-----

You and I,
Ho Chi Minh,
In Nineteen
Sixty-Nine

Babe, we made it to morning in Viet Nam again.
I know because the deranged boy is running naked through the dirt road again
and the cacophony syllables of his mother’s worried yells has awakened me.

It’s morning, darling.
Senior senors leave the huts of the young senoritas they don’t know—
their cologne washed off of their wrinkly selves – freshly bathed with rain water—
leaving no odor from the night that turned banal fear to mortal euphoria.

Stretch out your muscles, darling, for sunrise.
And your green-brown eyes must greet it. Your torso must say good-bye
to the side of my head and become vulnerable as it separates
from my hair as your fur.

See the bright reds and yellows, darling? The republic’s still calling
to pull brown skin from brown skin. Your eyes so calm, but please—you must stop your soft tender snoring and turn them to mellow yawns.
I will make tea and ready your suit and
we will hug and hug and
hold.

For darling, Viet Nam keeps calling.

I will kiss your lips a thousand times when you get back.
We will lay in our dome.
The deranged boy will run worriless through the streets.
I’ll let you scavenge my body and we can play accordion.
We will roll our eyes at perverted men.
We will lay for days and days in bed—feigning for each other and
all will be good and calm and well again.

But my darling, the morning is calling, and the gun shots are firing,

And I know these days will extend to more days and days.
But I promise to stay strong through eons of
sunsets.
I’ll pray for our brothers and I’ll pray for the haze
of the bullets to cease – but not one in you.
And I will be here when you come back exhausted
needing my therapy to wash away the blood and the blues.
But right now, my reluctant heart wakes you up
for Viet Nam