My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter Read online

  my mother

  was a

  freedom fighter

  my mother

  was a

  freedom fighter

  aja monet

  Haymarket Books

  Chicago, Illinois

  © 2017 Aja Monet

  Cover photograph, “In the Mountains of Santiago de Cuba” © Carrie Mae Weems

  Published in 2017 by

  Haymarket Books

  P.O. Box 180165

  Chicago, IL 60618

  773-583-7884

  www.haymarketbooks.org

  [email protected]

  ISBN: 978-1-60846-768-6

  Trade distribution:

  In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

  In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

  In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

  All other countries, Ingram Publisher Services International,

  [email protected]

  This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

  for the daughters

  Contents

  foreword

  author’s note

  the labor movement

  I. inner (city) chants

  the ghosts of women once girls

  language frontiers

  if speaking is belonging

  what my grandmother meant to say was

  if ever you find yourself on the j train

  wit

  for the mothers who did the best they could

  when the poor sing

  jungle gym

  564 park avenue

  on asking my grandmother about santeria

  an offering

  limbo

  ree ree ree

  tardiness

  my parents used to do the hustle

  birth, mark

  shell shock

  reflection

  legacy

  district two

  inner healing

  footnote

  give my regards to brooklyn

  II. witnessing

  the young

  irreplaceable

  the first time

  the whistleblower

  71st and collins

  #sayhername

  cook county

  i’m just doing my job

  dark matter

  black joy

  it is what it was

  survival of the richest

  starkville city jail

  mobile technology

  america

  when in french country

  every drop counts

  for fahd

  a voice from azadi square

  the giving tree

  we are

  a storm in a teacup

  solidarity

  sentiments of the colored women

  Nehanda taught me

  my mother was a freedom fighter

  III. (un)dressing a wound

  when in doubt

  billie’s flower

  album credits should include all the bed maidens

  niggas in paris

  nobody’s fault but hers

  the body remembers

  logan square

  is that all you got

  let’s don’t

  the emerging woman after aborting a girl

  a small luxury

  dream deferred

  each poem i take my pedestals and bury them

  you make holy war

  unhurt

  slow season in titusville

  i say i love you

  selah

  mi vida

  la riad hammam

  the ways of the many

  daphne

  a portrait

  tomorrow

  she sweats

  daughters of a new day

  acknowledgements

  foreword

  (Awesome) Aja,

  What would one say to the daughter-sister of a freedom fighter? The witness to her own freedom fighting? To those who read your words disembodied from the fullness of you?

  Your poetry reminds of the death-defying anti-gravity miracle work the feminine spirit does. She rises not only in survival, but a thriving grace: that thrival magick. We spent Sunday nights at Abiodun’s, poetry from the block competing with NBA lay-ups and the mmmm’s of salmon croquettes and grits comingling in our mouths. “Come listen to the word,” he said. You in Black Panther shirt, hair pulled back, puff of tight curls forming crown, reciting fresh poem from paper, but ingrained on soul, disorienting listeners:

  there are some things that will bring even the strongest woman down for colored girls, it is the moment you hear the spirit break

  Our poetry met before we did. We shared a habibti-sisterhood kindred language spoken with a soulful Global South twang. May we be our vibrantly crazy, hysterical, and moon-sick selves. We are not perfectly packaged productions. These poems are the flashes of your journey, chants at the protest against domination. They are not the totality of triumph, or the totality of you. They won’t know the zeal in your voice when you first read Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed. What it meant for you to retrace Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men ethnographic journey from Eatonville to New Orleans. How many times your heart revolved when a toddler in occupied Hebron kissed your hand. They will never know what you meant by “the politics of the urge to ejaculate” because they didn’t hear the two-hour red-wine-inspired argument outline that preceded it in East Jerusalem. They might never hear the conversations we had linking Santeria, Sufism, the influence Afrofuturists like Sun Ra’s and Octavia Butler’s intergalactic hybridity had on your artistry. They won’t know the despair you felt holding a gun for the first time: instrument of war. They won’t know what sipping on cafés au lait, daily trips to the boulangerie for pain, shrinking US-centrism, and what living undocumented in Paris looks and feels like when the glamor subsides. They can’t imagine the wideness of your smile when you warmed hands over chestnuts roasting on an open fire when it snowed in Bethlehem and every time you caught your twin flame’s eye that day. They won’t know how the Haitian earthquake in 2010 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 weighed on you or your organized response to them.

  They won’t know how closeness and distance from the freedom fighter who birthed you continues to weigh on you. They won’t know how often you wrestle with the praxis of solidarity and sisterhood. You survive in the telling and you are reborn in the testimony.

  Poetry helps to make sense of not only what happened but what continues to live in you. It reveals the dynamism of process, of transforming in front of us. This poetry is the unfolding of where you’ve been. You will continue to unfold. It is the totality of the process of your thoughts, the messy, the unrestrained, the too loud, the too much space, unformatted, the oscillating between “we” and “i,” the not enough punctuation.

  Your poetry doesn’t need to come from your mouth for people to hear you. And yet there are those who will still not hear you. You can’t control other people’s reactions to you; at best, you can manage your response.

  in loving always,

  (marvelous) maytha (alhassen)

  author’s note

  my mother was a freedom fighter and so were her mother and her mother’s mother. i witness their movements in this world and it informs my own, their labor to love and live freely, their joy and their pain, their magic and madness. our cycles. i inherited their strength to survive in my struggle to be tender. i’ve learned, all violence is a violence toward women. there are wars waged on our bo
dies but no body is here except through the portal of a womb that carried the body. to hurt one is to hurt each person who labored to create us. the womb is a specific site of violence and yet it is not solely defined by the brutality it endures but also the creativity it nurtures. the yoni is not a battlefield of knowledge and theory but a source of mysticism. women of the diaspora, whom i love, who do not rely on physical strength alone but spiritual and emotional strength as well; they taught me that these poems are a way one posits the importance of feeling deeply in order for substantial social change to take place. this is a way of exploring the unknown. actions without a confrontation of repressed feelings become movements without meaning. gestures in good faith do not end oppression; it is risk and ruthless radical love that will see us through.

  there are many contradictions in the pursuit of liberation. i live in the contradiction. i live in the mystical nuance. i use poems to access some strange sort of freedom and yet still i am bound to the circumstances that brought them to be written. wool spirit and silk skin, i shine. i am haunted and hunted. i imagine, forgive, and i am inspired. fierce and full of fury, i am drama, giddy with gossip. beyond human, i am at baptisms and funerals, churches and courtrooms, gardens and beaches. i am the prostitute and the saint. sweat, sore nipples, and a bloody inner thigh, i predate gender. i love every face wet and blinking out of a cosmos. i am where people crawl into breathe. i am born again each month and crying cause i know the cleansing power of tears and hiccups. i am best in the arms of a lover who won’t kill me. i dream of a world where no mother regrets, no mother resents, no mother buries her child. as i mature and become more fully the person i wish to be, my writing deepens, and i learn to face these poems and let them go. i have held onto some of them for far too long. they were written, selected, and ordered by my intuition, honoring what words could never know.

  i dedicate this book of poems to the children and the women, like myself, who struggled to reason bringing them into this world. perhaps, they’d say, too, “my mother was a freedom fighter.” i dedicate this to a life of tenderness.

  the labor movement

  i never met a woman who wasn’t

  fighting for freedom

  an entire life

  to trust

  what truth

  reveals

  I. inner (city) chants

  we are the stories

  we tell

  ourselves

  the ghosts of women once girls

  somewhere a little girl is reading aloud

  in the middle of a dirt road. she smiles

  at the sound of her own voice escaping

  the spine of a book. she feeds on her hunger

  to know herself. she has not yet been taught

  to dim, she sits with the stars beneath her feet,

  a constellation of things to come.

  as if a swallowed moon, she glimmers.

  her head wrap rolls out in a gutter, bare feet

  scat the earth, the ghosts of women once girls

  make bridge of the dust dancing behind her,

  she decorates the ground in dimples

  she stomps suffering out the spirit

  hooves drumming the earth in circles

  she holds gladness in her mouth

  like a secret teased out of a giggle

  joy like her sadness overflows

  she is not the opinions of others

  she is of visions and imagination

  somewhere a little girl is reading aloud in the middle of a dirt road.

  she smiles at the sound of her own voice escaping the spine of a book.

  she is a room full

  of listening, lending herself

  to her own words

  somewhere

  a deep remembering of what was, she survives all.

  language frontiers

  of timbres,

  tones,

  and convictions

  nuance of noise every

  sound

  has a song,

  a means of travel.

  the great listening

  begins

  a poetic life,

  an art of attending

  self,

  a word

  has no destination,

  panting

  in what

  the eyes

  swallow,

  the ear holds

  thunder,

  the mouth

  is blown away.

  what is said

  when we speak?

  in the gut,

  mapping breaths,

  clairvoyant as a cry

  a metaphor

  is

  embodied practice.

  we lose

  our meaning

  in its search.

  saying as seeing,

  seduced by memory,

  surrender

  stretch

  a voice

  into strength

  sparring in the pulse

  of another,

  of what aches, what heals,

  what longs to be understood,

  all that is

  lost in translation.

  what is surrealism

  but ancestral memory?

  recurring images,

  chants, and feelings,

  untouched.

  our ancestors

  look at us

  from the borders

  of a lettered city,

  across consonances,

  we speak.

  if speaking is belonging

  is a truth i know to heart

  if speaking means you have to listen

  if listening means i exist

  if existing is breath uttered in a story

  what of my speaking is not poetry

  if i make this language sing,

  if you have to hear me when you read me

  because my rage is in these words

  and so is my calm and so is the voice i listen to

  these words are something other than you

  reading them, i speak like i got a right to say

  something like my life depends on it

  if it can’t be spoken, it ain’t worth writing

  i read, i listen

  if i listen more than i speak

  don’t mean i speak any less.

  what my grandmother meant to say was

  i glow. i am luminous. i flare in the sky, a light

  gleaming in the Sierra Maestra at night. i am

  the mountains. i sway the sun to rise, yearning. i dance.

  i taste of salt. my fingers cannot sit still. i smuggled

  tears. from smile to smile, i ran. when i was too tired

  to run, i swam. love reached beyond borders. i swam.

  i rose. i flew. i dreamed. i fell in love with little to no

  belonging. i belonged to nowhere and no one. i was in

  love with everywhere and everyone. i was hungry, cold.

  i hated hunger and cold. i hated everywhere with no

  food. i hated everyone with everything. it was different

  then. i was stupid. i was a woman. i was waiting to

  become more than what happened, more than a bird

  fleeing my country, to bathe in being afar, more than

  a landscape or an image to cast a shadow on, a clip

  in a newspaper, more than a seductress or a magician

  of visions to foretell. my children, riding on the wings

  of my sacrifice, i left them. i turned back many times.

  i almost became the devil they wanted, but i left

  a devil—nonetheless. i was a woman ahead of her time

  i shimmer in scars, mapped by our bloodlines

  of living. i imagined more than broken families,

  i come from the laughter of aspiring lovers, the lure

  of trembling in another’s arms. what about what

  i wanted? who listens for what goes untold? i could not

  protect my
children from everywhere. i made offerings

  to the spirits who attend. i am their mother. i am not God.

  i was a candela. i was a witch they could not burn,

  la fuega. i was their mother. i was not God. i made choices.

  i made peace. i was a woman ahead of her time.

  i am the road you took

  here. i am la camina.

  i was the way.

  if ever you find yourself on the j train

  get off at Cleveland Street

  you will discover a neighborhood of noise

  the music will make your hips laugh

  the concrete is a pasture of broken nerves

  more importantly

  head toward the house shrouded

  under a ragged shawl of some amused sky

  this is 61 Ashford Street

  an old woman called my grandmother

  spends most summers on the front porch

  if you visit when i am a little girl

  you will see me sitting next to her

  in a beach chair

  agitated by humid spirits and smoke

  she blows ghosts from her lips

  fashioning cigarettes between her fingers

  like magic wands, her arms ripple

  like the branches of willows

  her hands are ancient

  i have watched them soften the necks of chickens

  how the blood drips from her wrists like syrup

  the stick and moist before falling

  she is a conjured woman

  and Cuba