"I will weep for you"
As I write this on June 4th, 2020 it is a birthday I will never forget. One that is bathed in a million thoughts, so many that I have not written much for days. My head is clouded, stuffed, over brimming with so many thoughts that I feel numb, feel sad, feel inadequate in how to march forward, in how to be part of societal redemption.
As we all know, on May 25th, in Minneapolis, Officer Derek Chavin held his knee on George Floyd's neck for over 8 minutes killing him. The details were disturbing for so many reasons. An onlooker took a video. It went viral and the image of a nonchalant officer with his hand in his pocket applying deadly, unnecessary pressure to a handcuffed George Floyd pleading for his life saying "I can't breathe" but Chavin or the three other officers not easing off despite people in the crowd pleading for Floyd's life, is not only disturbingly beyond belief but vexing. Why? At times the word looms so large that it is all I can see.
And as we all know, his death has solidified a nation and a world in protest against Police Brutality and racism. An unprecedented protest that has been horribly hijacked by agent provocateurs from the left and the right who want chaos. Businesses looted and burned. Police ratcheting up horrible brutal responses that are being documented on cell phones. The pain and turmoil feels like an abyss.
Amid all this there are moments of light. State Attorney General Keith Ellison who took over the case, at the behest of Minnesota Governour Tim Walz after the Hennepin County District Attorney's disregard for filing charges, announced just yesterday that Chauvin former 3rd degree murder charge would be upgraded to "Murder 2nd Degree (without intent while committing a felony) and the three other (former) officers, Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng, and Tou Thao, are now charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter.
Besides the horrible scenes of Police Brutality aimed at Protesters and a President whose only advise is to seemingly shoot at looters and take a heavy handed approach to crowd control by shooting tear gas and rubber bullets into large masses of people, there are scenes of protesters stopping looters and other outside instigators and some scenes of cops taking off their riot gear and walking in solidarity, or taking a knee.
And "taking a knee" has been in my mind too and Colin Kaepernick, former American football player and now full time activist, whose rallying cry 4 years ago opposing racism and police brutality by taking a knee during the National Anthem seems so prescient now. But then, to those fighting racism and fighting for social justice for all people, it is sadly a seemingly never ending instance of history repeating.
On the terribly moving and eloquent "Oh My Brother" by esteemed North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green, from her debut album "The River Speaks of Thirst", she recites, bleeds emotionally for all "her brothers who have been silenced". The poem told with artistic flair is set to a dark dirge of sounds, a plodding downbeat and haunting horns, dark orchestrations and pouring rain. The result feels cinematic, like a voice over to a horror story except this one is real. Green wrote the poem years ago:
“I wrote 'Oh My Brother' several years ago. An invitation from a poet in New York invited other poets nationwide to submit poetry for the Poetry of Lamentation Online Anthology created to memorialize the murdered and symbolize solidarity with grieving families across the United States whose love ones are being murdered by law enforcement.
Again, writers, musicians, dancers, sculptors, and all artists are called upon to use our creativity to declare, agitate, and resist. We will not perish as long as we remember the righteous fire and light inside our artistic utterances."
At 68, she is still shape shifting after a life time of honing her voice, letting her spirit fly since a child as outlined by North Carolina journalist David Menconi :
"As a child growing up in Efland, descended from families of slaves going back centuries, she began writing poems, sealing them into jars and burying them in her grandmother’s yard with the intention of digging them up later. But after years went by and she tried to dig them up, the ground had shifted enough that she couldn’t find them. They were lost to the earth itself."
The official video for Oh My Brother bears witness to so many African Americans killed either at the hands of police or at the hands of deep hatred birthed out or racism. At the end of the video there is a stark reminder, 94 names starting with George Floyd and ending with Emmett Till. Reading those names and the weight of Green's words feel crushing. Most of us know about the horrific lynching of 14 year old Emmet Till in Mississippi in 1955 because his torture and death and subsequent acquittal of the two men (who gleefully killed him) by a stacked all white jury helped catalyze the modern civil rights movement. The audacity of the event and a reflective look at our own darkness was addressed in the 1962 Folk Ballad, "The Death of Emmett Till" by a, then 21 year old Bob Dylan.
But all the other names some of us may not know and even that, in and of itself, is part of the problem. How soon we all forget. How long before our raised fists lower and peruse the next binge watcher on NetFlix. Jaki Shelton Green is stirring up the conversation as all true artists do but, maybe in a new way for her. With a life as a storyteller, teacher, activist, inspiration and now recording artist.
"The River Speaks of Thirst" full length album, consists of 10 new, previously unpublished poems set to music and sound by producer Alec Ferrell. Shirlette Ammons is a cameo guest, along with Chapel Hill Poet Laureate CJ Suitt, gospel singer Jennifer Evans and, on the album-closing title track, Grammy-nominated jazz singer Nnenna Freelon in an epochal call and response.
I hope you all feel the weight of "Oh My Brother" but don't toss it aside. Wear that weight, learn the names, say them, read about their lives and educate yourself too. Protest on the ground or online and, most of all, talk to and learn to love each other.
-Robb Donker Curtius
"your shadow has been betrayed... the red of the bullet bleeds and covers every breath of all the life you've lived"
Jaki Shelton Green portrait by Sylvia Freeman
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:
LINER NOTES for debut album “THE RIVER SPEAKS OF THIRST” by JAKI SHELTON GREEN
YOU COULD ALMOST SAY THAT North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green’s very first publisher was the dirt she grew up on. As a child growing up in Efland, descended from families of slaves going back centuries, she began writing poems, sealing them into jars and burying them in her grandmother’s yard with the intention of digging them up later. But after years went by and she tried to dig them up, the ground had shifted enough that she couldn’t find them. They were lost to the earth itself.
Undeterred, Jaki never stopped writing, even at times when it seemed as if she would never be published, respected, heard. But she made it happen. By now, enough of Jaki’s works have been published by more conventional means to land her in the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2014. Her ascendance to North Carolina Poet Laureate, the first African-American to hold the post, followed in 2018, appointed by Governor Roy Cooper.
In performance, Jaki’s poems have always had a profoundly musical quality, images flowing by in the sonorous, knowing murmur of her voice. She comes by that quality honestly. Long before Jaki called herself a writer, much less a poet, music was an important part of her life. She grew up surrounded by records in the family home, taking in all of the jazz, rock, blues and soul music in the air—“The Last Poets,” Arthur Prysock’s “This Is My Beloved,” Nina Simone, James Brown, even recordings of street-corner speeches by Malcolm X—and it left a mark.
Put all of that together and add Jaki’s stature as beloved cultural icon in the fertile crescent of North Carolina’s music community, and you have The River Speaks of Thirst, her debut album. At age 67, Jaki is adding Recording Artist to her resume.
“For the past 20 or 30 years, people at readings have come up and asked if I have a CD,” she says. “Well, now I do. I’m terrified and also excited because it’s a new thing. But I’m comfortable with being uncomfortable. And this genre means a lot to me. It takes me back to a time when I was coming into consciousness of what it meant to be black in the U.S., to bear witness. At a reading once, an older African-American man came to me, started naming Harlem Renaissance poets and asked where I fit. I told him I’d like to think I’m just down the road on the continuum, moving along. It’s like a conveyor belt and someone else will be coming along after me, which is as it should be. That’s what this album feels like to me.”
Jaki’s work life has always been a complicated mix of writing, teaching, activism and sometimes all of the above simultaneously through programs like SistaWRITE, which she founded to help younger, under-represented voices get a wider hearing. Untold numbers of women have found their voices through Jaki’s inspiration and example. She’s become a major influence on younger generations of slam poets like singer/rapper Shirlette Ammons, who spent a lot of time reading and rereading Jaki’s 1996 poetry collection Conjure Blues while taking her own first steps as a writer.
“I could relate to her voice as a black Southern woman, and it felt like she was committed to sharing the perspective of a rural Southern black woman,” says Ammons. “She has a relationship with the land and the experience of blackness in the South. I just felt drawn and connected to that from the beginning. She’s important, someone who best represents what I think is the North Carolina experience on the page. She’s one of the best at capturing that.”
That experience is vividly rendered on The River Speaks of Thirst, which consists of 10 new, previously unpublished poems set to music and sound by producer Alec Ferrell. Shirlette Ammons is a cameo guest, along with Chapel Hill Poet Laureate CJ Suitt, gospel singer Jennifer Evans and, on the album-closing title track, Grammy-nominated jazz singer Nnenna Freelon in an epochal call and response.
But while Jaki shares her spotlight with customary generosity, the unquestioned center of this album is the poet herself. Her gentle murmur is so soothing it can take a while for the listener to realize these song-poems cover subjects like the middle passage of slavery (“This I Know For Sure”), lynchings (“I Wanted To Ask the Trees”), police shootings (“Oh My Brother”) and America’s original, still-biggest sin of racism (“Letter From the Other Daughter of the Confederacy”).
Hard but not hopeless, The River Speaks of Thirst casts freedom as its central theme and most-repeated word. It’s very much a document of its maker, as well as an impressive exclamation point for Jaki’s time as North Carolina Poet Laureate.
“Being the first African-American Poet Laureate really does matter to me on so many different levels,” she says. “I’ve been receiving depths of love in terms of what it means to total strangers of all different hues and belief systems and ages across the state. People really celebrate the space I’m in and appreciate what I’m trying to bring to the post. Yes, it’s about being an ambassador for poetry, but also compassion and kindness and how we might reimagine how art helps cross boundaries.”
—David Menconi
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