Common Good Collective

Poetry for Building Community, Reader, Significance Of Place, Wilderness: Sharing and Reorientation Permalink

From the Desire Field by Natalie Diaz

From the Desire Field

I don’t call it sleep anymore.
I’ll risk losing something new instead—

like you lost your rosen moon, shook it loose.

But sometimes when I get my horns in a thing—
a wonder, a grief or a line of her—it is a sticky and ruined
fruit to unfasten from,

despite my trembling.

Let me call my anxiety, desire, then.
Let me call it, a garden.

Maybe this is what Lorca meant
when he said, verde que te quiero verde—

because when the shade of night comes,
I am a field of it, of any worry ready to flower in my chest.

Land Commons Could Help Build Communal Wealth

Kofi Boone is a professor of Landscape Architecture at the College of Design at North Carolina State University. Professor Boone focuses on the changing nature of communities and developing tools for enhanced community engagement and design. Julian Agyeman is a professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. Together they have written an article (originally for The Conversation) that imagines the economic impact of community owned land in the Black community.

A long history of racism has prevented many Black folks from owning land or homes—making it harder to accrue wealth and pass it on to future generations.

Underlying the recent unrest sweeping U.S. cities over police brutality is a fundamental inequity in wealth, land, and power that has circumscribed Black lives since the end of slavery in the U.S.

The “40 acres and a mule” promised to formerly enslaved Africans never came to pass. There was no redistribution of land, no reparations for the wealth extracted from stolen land by stolen labor.

June 19 is celebrated by Black Americans as Juneteenth, marking the date in 1865 that former slaves were informed of their freedom, albeit two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Coming this year at a time of protest over the continued police killing of Black people, it provides an opportunity to look back at how Black Americans were deprived of land ownership and the economic power that it brings. An expanded concept of the “Black commons”—based on shared economic, cultural and digital resources as well as land—could act as one means of redress. As professors in urban planning and landscape architecture, our research suggests that such a concept could be a part of undoing the racist legacy of chattel slavery by encouraging economic development and creating communal wealth.

Land grab

The proportion of the United States under Black ownership has actually shrunk over the last 100 years or so. Read more

Share with a friend

Imagination: The Prophetic Act of Living an Alternative Narrative, Reader, Structure Of Belonging, Wilderness: Sharing and Reorientation Permalink

Postcolonial Love Poem: ‘How do you maintain your tenderness?’

Thirteen weeks into this global pandemic, a poet whose work I admire and respect on the ground and on the page asked me to review Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem. During these past four months, I did not know if I had a tongue strong enough to carry both grief and love. As I came across the line “He held the jagged piece of wood so gently. I had forgotten my brother could be gentle” from It was the Animals, I was not sure if I could cradle anything that gently.

Recently, in a free monthly workshop series, organized and co-hosted by poets Alán Palaez Lopez and Ariana Brown, they offered a prompt: how do you maintain your tenderness? In the ten minutes I had to write, I scribbled on my paper, I don’t know if I have any to begin with. Consider my offering as a “a poor translation, like all translations,” as Diaz writes in the poem “The First Water is the Body.” Postcolonial Love Poem is the second collection Diaz, a Mojave poet, has published since her first full-length collection My Brother was an Aztec.

The violence of a settler colonialism project is constant, ongoing, and present in both poets’ expression of that violence. Read more

Share with a friend

Possibly: Freedom for A New Story, Reader, Structure Of Belonging, The Abundant Community Permalink

Begin Again Dr. Cornel West and Eddie Laude Jr. Discuss James Baldwin’s Legacy

Eddie Glaude and Cornel West are both luminaries in American letters. West’s storied career has shattered boundaries across philosophy, theology, critical race theory, and American popular culture. Glaude studied under West, and has gone on to a distinguished career as a professor and social critic. This conversation has them reflecting on their mutual love and appreciation for another master of American literature, James Baldwin, in advance of Glaude’s new book, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. But this is not a garden variety author interview. The room nearly bursts with revolutionary love, the sort of love that creates space for belonging for everyone who longs for healing within this land.

To order Begin Again and other books by Eddie Glaude and Cornel West from Labyrinth, please visit labyrinthbooks.com and enter the discount code “Baldwin” at checkout to receive free shipment on your order.

Share with a friend

Imagination: The Prophetic Act of Living an Alternative Narrative, Poetry for Building Community, Significance Of Place Permalink

Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar was the son of formerly enslaved people. He was well-known for using African American Vernacular English in his poetry, as well as writing essays and short stories that were searing critiques of racism in the Jim Crow era. One can see the line – in rhetoric and experience – between Dunbar and another famous poet, Maya Angelou.

Sympathy

By Paul Laurence Dunbar

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!

When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;

When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,

And the river flows like a stream of glass;

When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,

And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—

I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing

Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;

For he must fly back to his perch and cling

When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;

And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars

And they pulse again with a keener sting—

I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,

When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—

When he beats his bars and he would be free;

It is not a carol of joy or glee,

But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,

But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—

I know why the caged bird sings!

Reflection: The symbolism of the bird as freedom and the cage as oppression is an important metaphor throughout many cultures. Let us reflect on this metaphor as we experience this global pandemic and the uprising for Black lives as a community and the significance of the places from which we are observe and participate in this revolution.

Share with a friend