African American identity issues
I was offended, too
All I could think of was Safiya Bukhari
a Black Panther and political prisoner
dead at 53
And what was done to Fred Hampton
and Huey Newton
I wanted to scream at the film, This isn’t a revolution
They said with the merchandising it made billions
A cartoon, while our education healthcare neighborhood
are still lacking.
I thought other things too how it descended haplessly
into Black-on-Black war
and the CIA agent is a good guy
And female Black action figures
hadn’t been seen on screen for forty years
Since the days of blaxploitation
And the same in literature
Thirty years between a prominent political
Artist lesbian
Like Audre Lorde
So actually, where’s the progress?
MASK
I knew and I wrote years ago
that the entire sci-fi genre had changed
when at the end of one of the Planet of the Apes sagas
Caesar the talking ape responds to his white owner who infantilized him
On Caesar’s rise to the throne
he says, Come home Caesar
Caesar responds of earth and America,
I am home
I knew that was a nod to the Obama age,
the first Black man in the White House
But it tipped the genre on its head
when every alien before and after says they want to return home
and Caesar says defiantly,
I am home
No longer a native son
no longer the space alien or stolen African
In my MFA thesis work long before the new Apes movie
I placed the character of Caesar at the mouth of Cape Coast Castle
following a trail of body parts spread across the Atlantic
trying to find his people
For Caesar to say you must acknowledge us
Another seminal moment was when Robert Downey, Jr. said
to a shocked audience, I am Iron Man
That was the end of the masked Superhero
A secret identity people would risk their lives to hide and discover
I remember feeling uncomfortable not knowing how Marvel would resolve
something we’d been so accustomed to
But I also knew and it’s something I write often, how after 9/11
All Hollywood endings changed
In the film Ladder 49 actor Joaquin Phoenix who plays a firefighter
doesn’t emerge from the flames and it’s devastating
Something you might have only witnessed in some dystopian sci-fi
I’ve been watching the TV show Black Lightning
A Black comic-book hero who’s
trying to save a disenfranchised devastated Black community like Flint
or any urban ghetto anywhere that’s been experimented upon
Drug ravaged whom the city wants to control
The only hope is Black Lightning
who is also a high school principal trying
to uplift the race
It’s corny as hell
with low production values
And the evil man is so sadistic
it makes me wince
But the show gets interesting with Black Lightning’s
two daughters who are also said to possess powers
the eldest teen is a lesbian
With lots of girl-on-girl action
The story gets interesting about ten episodes in
when his best friend the police chief
figures out who Lightning is and confronts him
I mean it should have been so obvious early on
It was ridiculous they didn’t know
But I wasn’t ready at all
when Black Lightning unmasked himself
His face naked before his friend
I felt his vulnerability
Raw powerlessness of being seen
Face wind eyes exposed
maybe it’s because we’ve always cloaked ourselves
historically
Made friends with night fall
Dawoud Bey showing the Underground Railroad at night
Utter blackness silver purple
Blue hue shades
DuBois Dunbar
A Black student reciting “We Wear the Mask”
Contemporary times teach you to hate
fear the woods and nature
The setting for horror
But for Black people
it is freedom
Maybe that’s why I winced
when he lifted his mask
Feeling both breath
and danger.
PROPHECY
Having been to Ghana twice, in 2005 and 2006,
the first time for almost a month and the second for two weeks,
a third time I traveled to South Africa in 2011
I could never call myself an expert on Africa, nor want to.
I can say that those trips changed my life forever, in mostly positive ways.
Based on those trips to Ghana and South Africa, I was able to predict
this moment in America where we would be obsessed with all things African
in art and film and culture.
I know when I saw the swirl of brown faces in Accra, experienced the bustling city
the stalls and stalls of vendors in Makola Market in Accra
and in Kumasi
and cell phones everywhere
I knew I was seeing gems of a hidden world/
with expanses of land, people, and innovation.
All I could say when I returned, as some white American tech giants
are starting to say now, “Africa is the frontier.”
“Africa will decide our future.”
I saw a similar but a different story in South Africa, a still burgeoning
and powerful queer and feminist community,
Innovation, business, art, and ideas that sprung up and bloomed after apartheid
I knew again Africa was the beginning and will be the end, alpha and omega.
After years of being crushed, colonized, raped, ravaged, and
pillaged by dictatorships, superpowers, colonialism, and tribal wars,
Africa is rising.
I saw it with my own eyes.
Five years ago I was hospitalized at NYU for about five days.
I had a series of kidney infections which some doctors were denying.
Only one believed me and treated me accordingly with proper antibiotics.
He was South Asian, he had trained at Mass General in Boston, where I’m from.
He was sitting on my bed in the penthouse since I had great insurance—people who are on death’s door don’t even get those kinds of rooms. It overlooked New York City.
I only had one other visitor, a white girl from my art therapy group, and the doctor.
After many years of strife and illness I was in an emotional wilderness
but I was talking to the doctor about books and writing and my travels in Africa.
I said, “It’s the frontier.”
He said, “Yes. I think China knows that and it’s why they’ve invested so heavily there.”
A second instance when I detailed my vision about Africa as the future—
It was sometime after I’d left Ghana. I was serving on an artist grant panel in New York and artists from Europe were being considered but African artists, specifically one from Nigeria, was dismissed as being too far away.
I went home that night and prepared a speech to deliver to the committee.
I practiced in the mirror for the next day.
In one line I said, “It is time for us to consider African artists.” My voice was trembling.
I was the one Black person on the panel, the one who
