Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth: Phantom Limb, Octavia Butler’s “Kindred,” and Tiphanie Yanique’s “How to Escape from a Leper Colony”

In Octavia Butler’s time-traveling fantasy Kindred, the novel begins with the main character, Dana, losing her arm. Even without the ending, that is an unusual way to begin a story. Similarly, Tiphanie Yanique‘s mythic/mystical/religious storytelling in her short story collection How to Escape from a Leper Colony, includes in the title story, a character named […]

Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth: Audre Lorde’s “A Woman Speaks”

In honor of Audre Lorde’s birthday, which was yesterday, here is her poem, “A Woman Speaks.” I read comments about this poem and that it is about women in general, but I disagree. If it is read carefully, especially the last few lines, it is clear that it is about black women whose voices are […]

Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth: Audre Lorde’s “Recreation”

Thanks to Melanated Writers Collective for quoting the poem today. As a writer, I love the sensuality of this poem; how the two are creating themselves and the world around them in writing. Like two deities writing themselves into existence. Recreation Coming together it is easier to work after our bodies meet paper and pen […]

Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth: Kyla Marshell and Jason Parham

After reading Ebony’s “7 Black Writers You Should Know,” I wanted to highlight a couple of them in a post. Besides technology reporter Jenna Wortham and her Girl Crush Zine, and Uzoamaka Maduka attempt to revilitalize the American literary magazine with The American Reader. the two writers that stood out to me were Kyla Marshell and […]

Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth: Nathaniel Mackey’s “Sound and Sentience”

I wrote before about how limbo is a tangible dance recovery of the phantom limb or broken connection (a tangible made into an intangible) produced by the Atlantic between Africa and the Americas. Poet and writer Nathaniel Mackey also has written about it in his poems and essays, like “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol,” […]

Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth: Limbo by Edward Kamau Brathwaite

Will you make it to the other side? It’s amazing how many aspects of my culture and other cultures, too, are either hidden or diluted. One, for example, is the limbo dance that originated in Trinidad and Tobago. For many, it is only a fun dance game in which you try to pass under a […]

Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth: Jayne Cortez

MAKE IFA – By Jayne Cortez Make Ifa make Ifa make Ifa Ifa Ifa In sanctified chalk of my silver painted soot In criss-crossing whelps of my black belching smoke In brass masking bones of my bass droning moans in hub cap bellow of my hammer tap blow In steel stance screech of my zumbified […]

Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth: My Poetry 3

The Sound From Silence Its cry shouts out as if birthed, like the breaking of light from darkness, demanding to be heard, the universe, in search of itself, singing us into existence Vibrations pouring themselves into ears, waiting for the sounds to burst from mouths and hips and hands and feet, it sings body’s self […]

Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth: My Poetry 2

I wrote this poem a few weeks ago, but after I read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray yesterday, I revised it: In my detached, Disordered room Stands two mirrors On a brown wooden Dresser – veiled shadows in this chest, a frame gilded in stripes and flowers – I see myself in one’s […]

Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth: Myth in Brown Girl Brownstones

Last week I read Caribbean-American Paule Marshall’s novel, Brown Girl Brownstones, and to put it simply, I was blown away. It definitely on par with The Invisible Man. It is a coming of age story that follows a Bajan (Barbados)- American girl, Selina Boyce, who is finding her own path amidst the destruction of her […]