He wanted the world to see poetry’s importance.
Three months after he entered office
Obama boarded a plane to Ghana
He went to and was photographed at Cape Coast Castle, the former warehouse
Used for slaves
There Obama stood and looked onto the Atlantic.
He acknowledged slavery and the Middle Passage,
That’s the hope I have.
There in the loving defiance of Black slaves
In the unsung
runaways, the escapees, prisoners, martyrs
Those who never made it out
And in my students, the teachers, their voices, their formation,
inspiration
Artists shaping the world from earth and water into clay
CIRCUS ACTS
All rage aside
I gotta hand it to Trump and his admin because they
really have managed to stage the greatest heist
and show on earth
Like the old Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus
used to boast trapeze and live animal acts
before animal rights activists shut them down
I mean, this is like the heists in Oceans 11, 12, and 13
I could never watch because they seemed so contrived
Yes, they have delivered something so spectacular
it’s better than anything Karl Rove could have dreamt of
This even outdoes the architects of apartheid that turned the entire country
of South Africa into a jail for Black people
All I can think of is the movie Gladiator when Joaquin Phoenix plays
a corrupt emperor with no experience who
achieved power illicitly
When asked how he’d rule over the people
he said, “Give them games”
and every day slaves fill an arena to fight.
This is some high-wire sawed-in-half-lady shit
This is like some Hannah Arendt the banality of evil and
the bureaucratization of homicide shit
where the Holocaust was hidden in paperwork, menial tasks
everyone had a hand in
so no one saw the whole picture
I mean this is some sci-fi Octavia Butler and The Hunger Games shit
I mean nodding to Jayne Cortez’s
poem describing the rape of Joanne Little
Asking just what the fuck was she supposed to do
Tongue his encrusted toilet stool lips
Suck the numbers off his tin badge
choke on his clap trap balls
Squeeze the nub of his rotten maggots
Sing god bless America thank you
fucking my life away?
This is some scrambling around
too many balls in air
can’t keep track shit
More buttons pushed than when trapped in
an elevator panic
Some through the roof ratings shit
Record-breaking Roots shit
For pleasure, I watch the sci-fi spoof Agents of Shield
on Netflix
An agency of superheroes seeking justice
One of the characters said like the real-life Mark Zuckerberg
We no longer have to surveil people because
they offer up their information for free.
When alone, just to myself I secretly call Facebook/Racebook
Can’t say it out loud to anyone because you know …
people steal.
One of my friends, an older white woman who took the hit
for Abbie Hoffman
She went to prison.
She said, “Everything there is racialized,
they play movies constantly that will divide and create groups.”
That’s what happens on Facebook.
We are constantly fed race stories
whipped up into frenzies
It like a civil war every day.
This is some deep shit shit.
Talking to one of my students and
they said, “Oh Trump’s so stupid,”
I started to yell, “That’s what they want us to believe.”
“He’s playing the character in a soap opera
And we experience him as a character we know.”
Years ago, I was asked to join panel for an academic discussion
on Beyoncé
I asked that we not consider her as a personality but as a business
Like a marketing machine
Every time a Hollywood celebrity wants to sell something
these days they say something shocking with regard to race and gender.
Singer John Mayer referred to his dick publicly as a white supremacist.
The Seinfeld guy was filmed in a club, responding to a Black heckler
and said something like, “You’re lucky you’re not hanging from a tree
with a fork up your ass.”
The Seinfeld box set was released the next day and sold millions of copies.
The day before Madonna’s album dropped she took to Twitter
referred to her Black son as, “My Nigga.”
It’s all a strategy like when Jay and Bey sampled the lines
preceding an infamous beating of Tina Turner by Ike on their album,
It said, “Eat the cake Anna Mae,”
referring to when Ike brutally shoved food into Tina’s mouth.
From the beginning, you could tell Trump was running on
a racist platform during the debates, everyone in his family
except Melania
died their hair platinum blonde and he made Hitleresque signals
to depict the Aryan race.
On the panel where I posited Bey and our reaction to her
as a business and result of clever marketing
there was great uproar and pushback by Black women
soon to graduate.
I don’t care if you like me, I said,
but there has to be
analysis.
BLACK PANTHER
I watched Black Panther
and all I could think of was oh no
Giving permission
for a new crop of Black Americans
to visit Ghana and West Africa
Saying things like I’m home
and giving the Wakanda salute
Since Africa was presented as so easy
Bite-sized McNugget friendly
Lion King chunks
Some Africans would welcome them
but others would laugh
Big lumbering dumb Americans
Like those speaking English loud in foreign places
Swimming naked in religious communities
because the world is their oyster
I was embarrassed by it
Humbly asking someone to pardon our naïveté or privilege
It’s not our fault we were brainwashed and estranged
I felt protective, too
remembering my trip to Ghana
The castle
Sitting at the edge of the ocean
Bathing
Where the ships were loaded
Walking through those dungeons
of unspeakable horror
Slaves standing knee deep
In feces and urine
Fishing food from waste
I wanted to protect what I saw there
Not wanting loud Black American tourists
with their soles walking all over the ground
At the slavery museum in Portugal
the guard explained to me
Most people don’t even know what this is
Even after we explain, he said
Black Americans are the worst
Come straight from the ocean
won’t wipe their dirty feet
ask where the whips and chains are
because they only want gore
I want to say there are some things the movie did well
I held back tears when I saw the cloth
The kente brought back memories
of my ancestral journey
The longing for home
When the young man travels through a portal
to the ancestral realm
There was beauty
I also knew well the storyline
The lost orphaned African American returning to Africa
It was my MFA thesis work
inspired by my trip to Ghana
And actually the scholarship didn’t belong solely
to Ta-Nehisi Coates
It was Sadiya Hartman who wrote the book, Lose Your Mother
I was shocked that a superhero film
would attempt the depth of subject
But it quickly turned into using
