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My pen is the author of my bible

October 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

120 year old Bible back (American)My words by Vangile Makwakwa

My pen is the author of my bible
It tames my anger and makes me humble
Puts my tears down on paper
Before they stain my soul
Poetry is the only religion I know
The words I write are the truth I sow
Even when there is drought my soul will learn to reap wisdom
from my suffering
and so I shall not to weep

My words are the preachings of ancestors
Who spend their nights in my dreams
Telling me that poetry is my scream
Teaching me that their poverty and suffering
Can be read in my blood and should never be romanticised
And as such they weave my destiny
To fulfil their needs
Insisting that hard work is my tapestry
And has never killed off any race
So I should accept my lot with grace
Telling their story to redeem our future lineage
And free their captive past from false histories

My poems are my silent vindication
For my sister who has an intimate knowledge
Of violence and guns
They are my mother’s confused screams
At an unjust world
And my father’s quest for personal freedom
They are the random questions
My uncle taught me to ask
Before he chose silence as his truthful answer
They are the voices of young black women
Who cry my tears of frustration
At the unfairness of life
My words replace the fists of young black men
Who taught me to fight
Even as they take flight
And change sides leaving me alone at the front
My words are the result of friends
Who taught me that revolutions are personal
And the greatest belief is the belief in a better tomorrow
Filed Under: Poems and Poets Tagged With:

Spoken word from Honduras

October 21, 2009 By 1 Comment

Rigoberto Paredesis is considered one of the most influential poets in Honduras, I would love to share some of his work:

Written translation to video:
Elegy to Obesity by Rigoberto Paredes

Blessed be obesity, its grease
full of grace, the perfect
and resplendent curves of its contours.
Happy are they of ample arbor
where all who desire it
may find a sure port to pass the night.
They enjoy a good reputation,
these radiant, excessive beings,
the very images of abundance.
They open new frontiers wherever they go;
they don’t let anything go to waste,
neither time, nor dough, nor living.
Invite them to table, to bed
(neither with great reserve nor privation)
and living large, publically celebrate
this delicious extravagance, obesity.

Translation by Dave Bonta, Ref: http://movingpoems.com

Memorial by Rigoberto Paredes

one returns to the place where he left his life
when everything was the same age as dawn
lets his steps fall
on steps no longer resisting us
looks at the town’s clock
ant it marks the same hours that impelled our childhood
someone kisses us sweetly on one cheek
and on the other we feel oblivion’s slap
one comes back
and there’s no mother saying we’ve waited for you always
no father scolding us for our absence
time returns us to our origin in mellow waves
this that the house
the child crying for a bite
and the patio with old folks awaiting death at all hours
one comes back and there’s no dog gaily wagging its tail for us
there’s no one even saying things are worse why did you come back
only the age-old questions and the same terrible reality
the church with its beggars
fear and its judges
silence and its kin disrespecting the monuments
(the world that’s barely ours what a shaft)
rage is not the same it grows without mercy
it’s a wild beast stalking
and inside it tell us
we’ve come so far it’s impossible to forgive.
Translated by Janet Melvin, Ref: http://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org

Filed Under: Poems and Poets Tagged With: , , ,

In honduras they carve poetry on walls

October 16, 2009 By 2 Comments

I hope you are all doing well. Right now I am blogging about Honduras and am amazed by how rich the country’s history is. But really one of the things that keep coming up in my reading is graffiti – the country has been struggling with this problem since forever (decades really).

In certain cities in the world there are legal places to do graffiti, just because it costs governments a lot of money to clean up illegal graffiti. The BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4946378.stm) reports that. “in the United States it costs approximately $15 to $18bn annually to remove graffiti.” This is tax payers money so this is obviously a major problem. But should we not be asking why we even have graffiti? Is it free speech or art or a way to express yourself and interact with the public or is it just a crime?

Honduras is in the middle of a political crisis – the president was overthrown in a coup and that has led to public disturbance and street protests, which in turn has started to affect trade in surrounding countries. But the interesting thing is that there has been more graffiti on the walls. The reason for this spike is because the new government has issued a decree preventing the right to assembly and free speech, and has also closed various media sources in the country by force. Bloggers in Honduras are protesting on the internet and keeping everyone updated explaining that the truth about the situation is written on the walls of the country.

Crazy as it seems but people are using the walls in the country as their canvas to write their protests. Some of the most interesting quotes on the walls (see http://upsidedownworld.org for the photos) state:

“The Walls Talk When the Media Lies”
“No to the elections, yes to the constitutional assembly”
“My country free or death” 
“Out with the coup regime,”
“Sold out journalists your day will come,”
“Micheletti you are not my president! Signed, The People.”
“We will not give up”

One of the things that I am learning from the whole situation in Honduras is that people need to speak and speech is not always about the use of the voice but can be done in a very public manner. I know that Honduras is very unique in its situation of graffiti – some people spray painting on those walls are probably ordinary law abiding citizens that feel frustrated and just need to voice their opinion.

But the question still remains: is graffiti vandalism or free speech? Is this argument circumstantial? I mean are there any special circumstances such as in the case of Honduras where we can excuse it? Is it possible that the very presence of graffiti tells us something about our society – like the fact that there are people who feel so unheard, the only way they feel they will be heard is to destroy something? Is this a fallacy on our society? But then again should free speech come at the extent of destruction of property – public and private?

I hope this makes you think next time you pass a mural in the city.

Have a blessed weekend.

Filed Under: -Traditions: Americas Tagged With: , , , , ,

Clementina Suarez: I am an army of poets

October 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment

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I have always been a fan of Simone de Beauvoir (I own 2 copies of “The Second Sex”). I used to think of myself as feminist a few years ago (hell I went to an all girls high school and grad school) but somewhere on my travels I decided to erase all the philosophies I had learned growing up; choosing to dis empower myself because everywhere I turned (in magazines, in movies and in music) women were being told that they had to be something either than who they were. I secretly fell victim to the Cinderella complex. So even though my poetry highlighted this confusion and rebelled against it, in reality I was running and trying to mold myself into the prototypical nice girl (most people say I never was, but I did try, I was just not good at it).
There are times when I have to remind myself that revolutionaries are not all saints, they are flesh and blood and human – this is what draws me to most poetic revolutionaries. Because part of what makes poets so very interesting is that they are tortured souls and most of them are iconoclasts who become caricatures of society in their attempts to change it.
In Honduras, women poets are not as famous as their male counterparts but this situation would have been much worse had it not been for women such as Clementina Suarez, the notorious pioneer of Honduran women poets who in the 1920s called herself an “army of poets” and refused to live a life that was already mapped out for her. Her life was ended violently in murder but I still believe that death is a by product of life and the most important thing is how passionately you live.I would not say that Clementina Suarez was a caricature but I will say she was either an iconoclast or a woman before her time. She shocked Latin America with her female-focused poetry, her carefree lifestyle (they had seen this in men but never in women) and dedicated her life to arts and poetry as opposed to just motherhood. She chose to carve her own life and refused to stay put, choosing instead to travel all over Honduras, New York, Mexico, Cuba, and El Salvador and befriending just about every famous artist in Central America.

The beauty of being a pioneer is that you are the first, the template, the blue print and so you get to write the script and show them all how it is done and Clementina Suarez did just that – she wrote about sex and politics all in the same vein and with the same passion. She was a revolutionary but she was a poet and human; she made mistakes and was not perfect but she lived. She was a mix of good and bad flaunting her affairs publicly – when asked (by a bunch of women) at a dinner party how many men she had slept with, she replied that she did not know, but she knew that she had slept with all their husbands; adding that the difference between her and those women was the fact that she was an international whore and they were provincial with questionable taste.

That is just an example of the woman who changed things and made history in Central America…below is one of my favorite poems be her:

The Poem by Clementina Suarez:
If you start to write a poem
think first of who will read it.
Because a rhyme is only a rhyme
when someone understands it and lives on
over and above all,
having escaped the mediocrity
that flippancy or wordiness exalts
A poem is not necessarily as it is
but as it should be in its spirit of justice.
A word is sufficient to love hope
and to speak of this is more important
than the most beautiful but ordinary poem.
Filed Under: -Traditions: Americas Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Revolutionaries should never be considered fashionable

October 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I am shocked to learn that poets in Honduras are very well respected and even enjoy some kind of fame, that is mainly because in the midst of chaos and politicians’ lies, poets have come to be seen as truth-tellers in the society. In Nichiren Buddhism we talk about the fact that the lotus flower grows in muddy swamps because the lotus flower is one of 3 flowers that seeds and blooms at the same time. So in Honduras, despite the crazy politics, the hunger, the dictators, the lies and the politics, you find the most poetic of individuals, you find revolutionaries who have no weapons but a voice.

Of course poetry in Honduras has changed over the past century, it has become more revolutionary and more rebellious – this makes sense if you consider the fact that poetry is a mirror reflection of society and Honduras society and the global sphere have all changed (we are no longer in Kansas). Of course this trend of glorifying the poet had to start from somewhere even in Honduras – badly lit bohemian bars. Why do all poetic revolutions start in badly lit underground bars? Do poets just have bad taste? Is it because we are all starving artists? But that does not explain the crazy bohemian, disheveled look that goes with this scene. We all know this look: dread-locked, bearded, staved, layers of clothes and bare foot look …(I sometimes fall victim to this questionable fashion sense myself so I need to find an answer and ask why).

Honestly, I used to think the phenomena of badly lit bars and questionable fashion sense was something that started with my generation but I keep getting proved wrong.  As early as the 1930s some of Honduras’ now historically famous poets, were gathering in bohemian cafes and badly lit bars to share their poetry and denounce dictators. These poets came to be known as the Generation of 1935, this generation defined a period that would later be considered one of the most vital and creative in Honduras’ history. They moved away from traditional poetry and wrote poetry in the common language of the people, experimented with rhythms and themes and what was known as “negrista (black) poetry”. This of course, was the movement from traditional written poetry to spoken word poetry.

Despite the experiments and bohemian nature of the poets – they were revolutionaries and pushing the limits and many were forced to flee Honduras in order to continue writing elsewhere. Some of the poets to come out of this age were Claudio Barrera and Jacobo Carcomo, who were both exiled and forced to flee to Mexico because of the political and social nature of their work. I admit that their style was questionable but their passion was not at all lacking. In the words of Claudio Barrera: “Our songs serve a social mission We form the spiritual harmony of the people and translate jealously their struggles, their ideals and despair.”

Filed Under: -Traditions: Americas Tagged With: , , , , ,
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