Go 'Head! It's Your Birthday!

Yes it is! This is my birthday weekend and I have already started the celebrations. You might not be hearing from me for a couple of days, so I will leave you with this silly little poem that I wrote:

Yagé (Celebration of Self)

I blanket myself in the comfort of knowing
I am.

I am anything and everything I choose:
strong, sexy, simple, and sweet,
caring, cruel, charismatic, and complex,
all at the same time.
Whether mean, moronic, maniacal, or moody,
loving, lucid, laid-back, or light-of-heart,
I am beautiful in all my passions.

I am Me and it’s a beautiful thing!

Unconquerable, though they try.
I am the Sphinx, reveling and dancing
in the splendor of their awe.
Confident? Sure, but still humble.
I cherish every deep breath.
I know my place in this world,
I just happen to love where I stand
because no matter how everyone views me,
I know how I see myself;
that’s the most important thing.

I matter.

Don’t hate that I celebrate my birthday everyday.
If I won’t, who will? Only I can provide myself with
true happiness.
I’m tired of writing love poems about other people.
It’s time to write a love poem to myself and
celebrate who I have become, who
I am.

Yeah, it’s hard being me, but I love every minute!

©2005 Vicky Therese Davis

See ya when I'm a year older!

As Told by My Grandmother

The other day a stranger complimented me on my hands and told me they were very pretty. It made me look at my them in greater detail later on that night. I thought of a time when I was sitting with my grandmother at her little round kitchen table -- where all the family congregates at any time of day or night -- looking at old pictures. She was handing me an old sepia photograph of her when she was in her early twenties; she was absolutely beautiful. My grandmother studied the picture as if looking at it for the first time as well, then she remarked at how much we favored each other. As I took the photo from her to see for myself, our hands touched, and for the first time we both realized that we had the same hands; hers were just older and more worn (as I'm sure mine will be). She was looking at her past and I my future. We both looked at each other and laughed so hard we cried. That was five years ago, but boy does it feel so recent.

This memory compelled me to look through some of my old things and I came across some short stories my grandmother wrote. My dad copied them for me after she passed away last year. It was her birthday last week, so I felt it only right to bring her back to the forefront of my and my family's minds to recount a story written in her hand, so much like mine, about her own grandmother. And to think we both shared a passion for writing, too!


"As Told by My Grandmother..." by Maurine Davis

My grandmother lived on a farm in Woodlawn, Tennesse. Her name was Addie Estella Morrow. She was about four feet and eight inches tall. A little dumpy lady with white hair that she wore in a bun. She was the mother of nine children. But only four were living by the time I came along.

She always had stories to tell us about the time she and my grandfather bought a three hundred acre farm from a German friend of theirs who didn't like his fellow neighbors and they didn't like him. So he sold his farm to a black man, my grandfather. He was the only black man in the area who owned such a property.

So one night the Klu Klux Klan Night Riders came riding up on their horses all dressed in their white hooded robes and asked him to come outside. He didn't respond at first however, but after many entreaties he opened the door wide and let his double-barreled shotgun respond to their request.

After that, the only sound heard was the resounding of horses hooves galloping away.


I guess spunk runs in the family too!!!

A Wise Man Once Said...

I really admire Cornel West's mind and always listen when he has something to say on topics that interest me (and more often than not, he is speaking about something that interests me). This recent acknowledgement he made on Hurricane Katrina was sent to me in an email and I feel compelled to share it with everyone:

“I'm not asking for a revolution, I am asking for reform. A Marshall Plan for the South could be the first step."


Exiles from a City and from a Nation

By Cornel West
The Observer UK
Sunday 11 September 2005

It takes something as big as Hurricane Katrina and the misery we saw among the poor black people of New Orleans to get America to focus on race and poverty. It happens about once every 30 or 40 years.

What we saw unfold in the days after the hurricane was the most naked manifestation of conservative social policy towards the poor, where the message for decades has been: 'You are on your own'. Well, they really were on their own for five days in that Superdome, and it was Darwinism in action - the survival of the fittest. People said: 'It looks like something out of the Third World.' Well, New Orleans was Third World long before the hurricane.

It's not just Katrina, it's povertina. People were quick to call them refugees because they looked as if they were from another country. They are. Exiles in America. Their humanity had been rendered invisible so they were never given high priority when the well-to-do got out and the helicopters came for the few. Almost everyone stuck on rooftops, in the shelters, and dying by the side of the road was poor black.

In the end George Bush has to take responsibility. When [the rapper] Kanye West said the President does not care about black people, he was right, although the effects of his policies are different from what goes on in his soul. You have to distinguish between a racist intent and the racist consequences of his policies. Bush is still a 'frat boy', making jokes and trying to please everyone while the Neanderthals behind him push him more to the right.

Poverty has increased for the last four or five years. A million more Americans became poor last year, even as the super-wealthy became much richer. So where is the trickle-down, the equality of opportunity? Healthcare and education and the social safety net being ripped away - and that flawed structure was nowhere more evident than in a place such as New Orleans, 68 per cent black. The average adult income in some parishes of the city is under $8,000 (£4,350) a year. The average national income is $33,000, though for African-Americans it is about $24,000. It has one of the highest city murder rates in the US. From slave ships to the Superdome was not that big a journey.

New Orleans has always been a city that lived on the edge. The white blues man himself, Tennessee Williams, had it down in A Streetcar Named Desire - with Elysian Fields and cemeteries and the quest for paradise. When you live so close to death, behind the levees, you live more intensely, sexually, gastronomically, psychologically. Louis Armstrong came out of that unbelievable cultural breakthrough unprecedented in the history of American civilization. The rural blues, the urban jazz. It is the tragic-comic lyricism that gives you the courage to get through the darkest storm.

Charlie Parker would have killed somebody if he had not blown his horn. The history of black people in America is one of unbelievable resilience in the face of crushing white supremacist powers.

This kind of dignity in your struggle cuts both ways, though, because it does not mobilize a collective uprising against the elites. That was the Black Panther movement. You probably need both. There would have been no Panthers without jazz. If I had been of Martin Luther King's generation I would never have gone to Harvard or Princeton.

They shot brother Martin dead like a dog in 1968 when the mobilization of the black poor was just getting started. At least one of his surviving legacies was the quadrupling in the size of the black middle class. But Oprah [Winfrey] the billionaire and the black judges and chief executives and movie stars do not mean equality, or even equality of opportunity yet. Black faces in high places does not mean racism is over. Condoleezza Rice has sold her soul.

Now the black bourgeoisie have an even heavier obligation to fight for the 33 per cent of black children living in poverty - and to alleviate the spiritual crisis of hopelessness among young black men.

Bush talks about God, but he has forgotten the point of prophetic Christianity is compassion and justice for those who have least. Hip-hop has the anger that comes out of post-industrial, free-market America, but it lacks the progressiveness that produces organizations that will threaten the status quo. There has not been a giant since King, someone prepared to die and create an insurgency where many are prepared to die to upset the corporate elite. The Democrats are spineless.

There is the danger of nihilism and in the Superdome around the fourth day, there it was - husbands held at gunpoint while their wives were raped, someone stomped to death, people throwing themselves off the mezzanine floor, dozens of bodies.

It was a war of all against all - 'you're on your own' - in the centre of the American empire. But now that the aid is pouring in, vital as it is, do not confuse charity with justice. I'm not asking for a revolution, I am asking for reform. A Marshall Plan for the South could be the first step.

--------
Dr Cornel West is professor of African American studies and religion at Princeton University. His great grandfather was a slave. He is a rap artist and appeared as Counselor West in Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions.
-------
Interview by Joanna Walters, in Princeton, New Jersey

I'm Back in Action!

This is the longest I have been away, and not by choice, either. Hurrican Katrina had her grip on my internet capabilities until late last week. I will not complain, however, because the devasation she left behind in the Gulf Coast is incomparable. My heart and thoughts go out to those who are suffering in that region. Having to begin new lives after such a disaster, I can't even imagine being in their shoes. But as the news reporters have been saying recently (prompted, surprisingly, by Rev. Al Sharpton), they are not refugees, they are survivors; they will find ways to start over.

I will say this, though: I am tired of seeing nothing but the depressing sights on TV of the mess Katrina left behind; I am tired of rising gas prices and the cost of living; I am tired of our leaders constantly letting us down, abandoning and neglecting us; I am tired of Kanye West's big mouth, and as a result, feel sorry for Mike Myers who had to play it cool when Kanye decided to spout off his personal opinions at the wrong time; I am tired of everything in this country being narrowed down to "race relations." I am "sick and tired of being sick and tired!"

What I do love seeing is how civilians in this country band together when our fellow citizens need our help. It was visible during 9/11 and it is apparent now. Lately, watching the rescue efforts is the only thing that warms me. The compassion that we suppress in daily life releases itself in abundance when tragedy strikes, and being able to actually see it in the faces and efforts that people are making is what makes me feel proud to be American.

For all of those in the Gulf Coast, we hear and see you. Even if our leaders abandoned you, we will not. You are in good hands now.