Culture/Racism

The Day After Watching James Baldwin’s ‘I Am Not Your Negro’

Posted on by stephen t berg / 8 Comments
Dorothy Counts, Charlotte NC, 1957

I wrote this poem last September. A week ago, when George Floyd was murdered, I recalled the poem and the documentary.

 

The Day After Watching James Baldwin’s ‘I Am Not Your Negro’

This morning after opening the sliding glass door
I hear a cat somewhere in the hedges
scream in a way that stops my heart.

It is still dark when I hear it again
and for the second time my pulse is arrested
and I think to get a flashlight and rush out to the hedge.

But instead I slide the glass door closed and return to my coffee.
What else can I do?
It’s dark and I don’t have all the facts.

Now that I think of it, I’m sure it came from my neighbours yard.
There’s an issue of jurisdiction here, surly.
And who’s to say, perhaps the cat needed to be moved along.

For that matter, I’m not even sure it was a cat.
In any case, it’s hardly my responsibility.

Look, it’s getting light now and nothing here
on my side of the fence
is out of place.

Last night I watched the documentary again (on Amazon Prime). It’s the story of James Baldwin (1924-1987), black, gay, a playwright, novelist, poet, activist, friend of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Dr. King, all murdered.

Early in the film there is a picture of 15-year-old Dorothy Counts, who in 1957 in Charlotte NC, walked into an all-white school while beside her the next generation of white hate, spit, jeered, taunted, while adults, parents, stood by. It was this picture that moved Baldwin, living in Paris, to go back to America and to Harlem.

There was unutterable pride, tension and anguish in that girl’s face as she approached the halls of learning, with history jeering at her back, it made me furious. It filled me with both hatred and pity. And it made me ashamed. Some one of us should have been there with her.

From where I live, insulated, white, gated by privilege, it all feels so far away, and yet, it feels like an indictment. Where, I ask myself, in this picture, would I have stood?

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it has been faced.

Whenever I’ve failed to confront the mundane, everyday racism around me, I’ve helped create a context of tolerance for acts as horrific as the murder of George Floyd, or here in my own country, Eisha Hudson or Regis Korchinski-Paquet.

History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise we literally are criminals.

When I’m silent, I help launch the first slave ship; when I turn away, I help build the first residential school.

The sad part is that most people who say they care don’t really care. What they care about is their safety and their profits.

All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism.

I was not a member of any Christian congregation because I knew they had heard but not lived by the commandment ‘love one another as I love you.’

Potential/Presence/Soul

Significant Strides in Soul Spotting

Posted on by stephen t berg / 6 Comments

We have it on forensic authority that the ache in your heart
can be filled with sunlight; the gnawing doubt about acceptance
can be traced to the doorstep of your Grade two teacher; 
and your nail-biting habit, when tested against a forest walk,
in combination with wren song, can be overcome.

Mind you, we’re in the early going and there’s much about your
internal map and pre-cellular structure that remains unexamined,
and in the interest of scientific and intellectual honesty,
we want to inform you that a substantial percentage,
of what at this locus we’ll call, your crux, may finally elude us.

You might, however, take comfort to know we’ve discarded the old model
(frankly a bust). Replacing the reams of once resolute thought — to wit:
the soul is individually and painstakingly crafted, packaged
and housed by an Almighty Being; awaits embryonic enjoinment
and arrives with an original flaw — will be, as our researchers
have exhausted themselves to illuminate, an alternative and more radical
understanding; far more fluid and too susceptible yet to observational influence
to posit a full theorem, but holding potential in its vast layered Wonder,
evident Mystery, if you will, of an open partnership in an unfolding creation.

Most surprising are the substrings of information coming back from
experiments done on the ventromedial root of your animating essence.
And on this, dear subject, if you’ll allow, may I, on behalf of our team,
tell you what an honour it is to be born on earth and take our place here
with you: the kindness, the radiant selflessness, the joyous compassion,
peace-loving wisdom and plain goodness that lies latent within,
is nothing short of what we in the lab call, Nobel-worthy.

The only thing that remains, for the trial, is your cooperation
in embracing that latency, then (the imperative) continually giving it away.
The apparatus we’ve developed, while immensely complex,
may yet be too crude to detect the emergent gleam of presence, of being
of true-soul, yet, our methods stand, as you may be privy to see,
on a hard-won hypothesis, effulgent with promise.

Art/Beauty/Light

Colours that Break Your Heart

Posted on by stephen t berg / 10 Comments
The Today – Laurie Macfayden

Colours that Break Your Heart

Lots of them in nature.
Take the willow leaf, for instance, tentative to emanate in still-chilly-April,
but there it is, that first green, hits you like a breakup letter from your first crush.

Or name any flower, say, California poppy, later in May, but a lilting bronze or libertine tangerine or languid orange that you’d rob a liqour store for.

Or yesterday, you’re walking the recycling to the lane, and a fawn so young she had those beige spots all over her buff coat (oh my!) and every bad thing you ever said about beige? mortal sin! and you swear repentance.

Then there’s the horizons. The kaleidoscopic setup/polychromatic tear-down of every day. Don’t get me started! Creation! Hellofathing!

Or maybe you’re having your second cup, browsing Facebook and Laurie or Len or Rianne or Mandie or your late friend Ginny (who never posted, so you did it for her) or Ellen or Rob, (you know, Shawna’s husband), or somebody,
even a complete stranger,
puts up a painting they’ve just completed
and in there somewhere is this blue, a cerulean blue that sings the note that shoots your soul for a loop and you put your Java down, go cross-legged on your couch, light three candles, bow your head and thank the Lord God for pigment.

Did you know Guy Head (great name) painted Iris? goddess of refracted-rays-of-sun, said to wear a coat of many colours, recalling to you that famous betrayal of brothers, painted by Ford Maddox Brown (looked it up) of Jacob holding his dead-but-not-really-dead son’s coat. Whatahellofapainting. Gut wrenching.

It’s all too much sometimes.
So maybe you go back to your room, pull the shades, look up when picture-taking was still spitting up — the sepia epoch — or find painters that colour-purged, Richter to Warhol, Jan van Eyck to Jasper Johns (looked them up). That’s a whole ‘nother thing: masters of monochrome. Not an insurrection but a revelation! how black and white can sew light and spirit you away to another dimension — some third heaven. Go figure.

That’s when you remember Grade 8 photography class and the b&w you took of Arlene with your Kodak Brownie — Lee jeans, cream blouse, left hand on perfect convex hip
— late June, sent you that breakup letter!

Ah, no matter, ‘cause by now you’re a grayscale-prairie-puddle reflecting a mid-March-lead-sky, so you pick up your bleeding palette, brooding heart, and shuffle on down the road; blue as hell but ready to tell anyone who’ll listen, about Arlene the monochrome siren or Iris the flying rainbow.

 

Love/Mother's Day

1938 Barley Harvest and Our Mother 1922 – 2013

Posted on by stephen t berg / 16 Comments
Discovered this photo in an old album my mother had kept. She had it dated and labeled.

Under the belch of a 10-20 Titan tractor,
smell of hot bearings, grease and barley dust,
by the steel wheel, bowing belt and fly wheel,
the feeder, cutter, cylinder-cave,
rub-bar, shaker, sieve and fan, and
chaff blown from ripe grain.

There, under that sepia sky of hope and hard work,
my mother — not yet a mother —
in a dress and apron, holding a hay fork,
as though, in fact, embarking on three careers at once.

No clue as to her future status as Queen,
in the eyes of her five children;
No clue her love would cover so much territory,
her humility carry so much weight,
her gaze, her smile, would hold us, mold us,
grow us, each of us assured and content in knowing
we were on her short list of universal wonders.

“Mom, your prayers for harvest weather,
was our great treasure, today
because of you, for you, we go reaping and singing
that old song, “We shall come
Rejoicing.”