The ‘New’ Civil and Human Rights Movement in America?

“If you are going to hold someone down, you’re going to have to hold onto the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own system of repression.” – Toni Morrison (Author)

Catherine Cotter / Los Angeles Times

From a legal point of view, the new civil rights movement means “equal rights = equal protection”. From a moral point of view, this new movement for marriage equality is about human rights and dignity, something that can’t be legislated or taught to people who in the latter 20th century and today don’t seem to understand what that means. Some of us still don’t understand what the black and women’s rights struggles in previous centuries really mean for humanity either. (I’ll give us a couple of clues: progress and evolution.)

About the violation of human rights and dignity: As a female human being with brown skin and of African ancestry, I have encountered a fairly limited amount of discrimination and abuse, so I don’t consider myself an expert on the matter. And race seems a silly concept to me considering what history and science is proving about our origins and why we generally look and behave the way we do. However, learning about the open discrimnation and segregation my mother and her grandparents faced before I was born has prepared me for the worst, while I hoped for the best in human behavior.

This is why I’m ashamed to see the display of hateful behavior from groups organized to prevent others from their pursuit of happiness, legislating morality through propositions, narrowminded biblical interpretations, and outright discrimination, intimidation and abuse through withdrawal of basic civil and human rights. When you deny someone their rights, you deny your own. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, many organizations in the south that weren’t the Ku Klux Klan, concerned citizen groups, used similar tactics to oppress the minority they viewed as a threat to their way of life. What these citizen groups didn’t see? That they were repressing themselves by denying the rights and dignity of other citizens based on illogical and irrational assumptions about humanity based on physical appearance and the oppressive legacy of slavery.

“What’s the difference between dragging a black man behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, and beating a white boy to death in Wyoming because he’s gay?” – Nikki Giovanni (Poet, Educator, Activist)

James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard

I don’t question the intentions of these new citizen groups and initiatives that oppose the new civil and human rights movement – which includes the legalization of same sex unions and stronger penalties for hate crimes motivated by differences in race and sexual orientation.  Citizens have a right to peaceably assemble, as well as petition their government if they believe a law must be written or changed. What I question is the lack of understanding that we are all human beings with desires and dreams of happiness. Regardless of race and religion, color and creed – despite all our perceived differences – I’m surprised and disappointed we overlook our similarities as human beings. Not all of us have the same goals to meet individual contentment, yet some of us (straight and gay) have the same desires and dreams in our pursuit of happiness – finding a soul mate, a life partner, someone to build a family with if that is what they choose. I’m fairly certain that in 1998, like an older black man from Texas, all a young white man from Wyoming wanted was to live in peace without threats to his freedom and life from the terror of bigotry.

Some who aren’t violent still hold these bigoted views and wish to revoke civil rights in the new century and millennium, although it is disguised as a moral complaint against a new minority – gays, lesbians, bisexuals and the transgendered.  There are many, including African-Americans, who justify discrimination and abuse by belief and faith in particular biblical principles, without regard to other principles promoted in that same good book—compassion and love. Many justify the revocation of rights of citizens and human beings by a lack of understanding or empathy.

There is no justification for injustice. When any peaceful human being’s liberty and life are threatened, intolerance and bigotry are never justifiable behaviors. Never. Just because you’re not gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered doesn’t mean hateful propositions presented by “concerned citizens” and upheld by courts shouldn’t matter to you.  As one human rights leader once said, “A threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”*

How many more people have to be denied civil rights, taken against their will, tortured and/or killed because they’re different before we realize this and protest?

-Danna Williams, in response to Proposition 8 in California and Proposition 2 in Texas, and a recent California Supreme Court ruling upholding the ban on same sex marriage.

*Martin Luther King, Jr.

New poetry, prose and short fiction coming soon… I had to vent.

Flowers for Mom: “How to Care for African Violets”

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How to Care for African Violets

You loved flowering plants, Mama,
but never had a green thumb.
Your thumb was fleshy pink underneath sepia,
darker than your official retirement gift:
a solid oak wall clock—and softer.

After your last day at work
you put the potted plant gift
on the kitchen windowsill—
the shade ceremoniously drawn at half-mast
to welcome the rising sun.

When company would come
you’d set the blooming plant on the tallest table
in the living room.
The brilliant violet petals and wooly waxen leaves
would glow under artificial light.

On special family occasions,
your brown hands delivered the flower plant
to the dining room table.
You’d ask my sister or me
to gently open the window blinds.

My sister and I gladly obliged,
eager to see you, beautiful in the light—
even as your petals fell and
your leaves bent with acceptance
of the end of your season.

(for P.A.W.)

Audio: How to Care for African Violets by Danna Williams

“How to Care for African Violets” © 2009 by Danna Williams; from Sense, a collection of previously published and unpublished poems.

Gray Day Haikus

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Gray Day Haiku #1 

Funny on gray days –

Houses look like frozen clouds

On the horizon. 

 

Gray Day Haiku #2 

On the dreary days

Houses uphill are prisons

Built by the inmates. 

 

Gray Day Haiku #3 

On the haughty hill

The houses frown down on me,

Threatening to rain. 

 

Gray Day Haiku #4 

Up winding sidewalks

Lay gray clouds of progress –

Fake silver linings. 

 

Gray Day Haiku #5 

Before weary eyes

A vista of dull castles

Blocks the view of trees. 

 

Gray Day Haiku #6 

As I reach the peak

A gray Hummer whizzes by -

But it doesn’t hum.

Movement

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Birthday Girl - April 17, 1952

Movement

i’m so tired of this static life -

tired of the cling of socks and sleeves

but something held me back before.

i thought it was a brief rest stop

but it was the trap of comfort.

i’m working it out like jackie -

classic dance beats and memories

wrap me in a blanket of grief.

we die alone in this world but -

it’s a journey we take together

i can’t look death in the eyes

until i plan a funeral

for self-centered youthful excess.

but i won’t let go of it now -

not for all the days of my life.

i’m working it out like kevin -

dark disco beats and cold comfort -

we really aren’t alone in this.

we have all been in denial but

it’s a journey we take alone.

should i kick and scream like a child

or leave a note for translation:

“Non. Non je ne regrette rien”?

melodrama is too easy -

living by my own wits is hard.

now i have different travel plans -

sometimes with a map or compass

sometimes we’ll intersect or pass each other

without a cross word-

or a crooked middle finger.

(For P.A.W.)

©2005, 2009 Danna Williams

Animal Flower Cave Sonnet

Animal Flower Cave in Barbados

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The following poem was almost submitted to H&H for review, but I considered it a waste of an effort so snatched it from the queue to place here as the early start of National Poetry Month.  “Animal Flower Cave” is one of a few recent attempts to compose a contemporary sonnet.  I won’t bore readers with the source of inspiration, but I will admit it has been too long since I’ve done a strict meter and rhyme verse.  My hope is that anyone reading it won’t judge it or the poet too harshly.  This may be my last sonnet, unless the ghost of Shakespeare inhabits my body, which is very unlikely.

Without further ado about nothing:

Your parting lips that touch the brazen sun,
also graze my tongue – suddenly struck dumb.
The thought of our sex under a sea bed,
and Barrett Browning swimming in my head
confounds the bounds of the hours and long miles-
rhyme conquers reason with seraphic smiles,
between the words and the stories we’ve told,
and sharp shears in your mouth you always hold.
Come swiftly, a speed of light, a heat wave-
through the walls and opening cave.
Wisdom comes to fools in the darkest hours,
truth and love shower the budding flowers.
In the cave’s light I want to hold your hand-
as riptides above separate the sand.

© 2009 Danna Williams

Love Poems (and Other Oddities) from Volume 4 of “Sense”

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I’ve been working on a collection of poems with a working title of “Sense” since 2003, and here is volume 4 from 2006. Some of these poetic oddities involve a love theme, coincidentally just in time for Valentine’s Day. At least one of these poems has been published already, “Tabula Raza Obscura”, and I’m hoping to publish one or two more individually – or collectively – within a few years.

SENSE

It’s Not Easy Writing The Book of Love

June 2006

like throwing hot grits on my face*

Sometimes what you don’t say
is more important than what you do.
I dreamt about her again,
this time scolding me
about to whip my ass -
me – a grown woman
of thirty-three!
But moms have that right.

He didn’t call me a liar,
or a cheat or a thief;
but it’s out there now,
dangling in the cold air
on a warm June night.
Now I’m thinking again -
what the hell was I thinking?!
Maybe I should give up drinking.

For the record, I didn’t lie to him,
or commit some moral or legal crime.
But now I know he doesn’t trust me,
and how can I live like that?
When you’ve done nothing wrong
and you still feel guilty,
maybe it’s time to walk away
and find solace in the solitude.

July 2006

tabula raza obscura*

she pretends it never happened
but there’s a gaping hole
in the middle of the floor
where he put his foot down

she’s walking in the dark
and falling to the underworld
where it’s ok to be imperfect
and better if you’re hopeless

she’s as hopeless as…
a penny with a hole in it
she’s looking for approval
because she thinks it’s love

he’s made up his mind now
she’s a badly drawn doodle
so he wipes her away quickly
with a dry eraser’s flourish.

(it’s a clean slate in her dreams.)

another case of writer’s block

everything has been written before
so i’ve given up poetry for good
now I can write that dessert menu

the world needs more pies and pastries
not “clever” ways to express joy & pain
the hot and cold of the human condition

give me a homemade carrot cake
not another awful love poem
sweetened with insincere artifice

let me dream of dark chocolate truffles
while malaise covers me like a blanket
because it’s comforting food to me now

And you can’t eat words.

he loves me, he loves me not

once upon a time when i was six
before i knew him, before he knew me
i swam in the deep bermuda grass
and picked countless clovers
and those little white flowers
a free gift with purchase.

the petals were so tiny and delicate
but i was a careful, patient little girl
plucking the petals and chanting
about that man i hadn’t met yet
hoping the answer would always be
“he loves me,” and not the other one.

Mama Cass’ Revenge

She loved him the first time he spoke to her but
they never had a real conversation about it.
They’d talk at each other, over each other,
always skirting around the issue -
the issue being she wanted him.

But society isn’t kind to fat women,
despite the Rubenesque portraits
and the feel of a flesh in the dark.
So she sang like a skylark without him,
leaving bubblegum pop days behind her.

You gotta make your own kind of music
and dream a little dream of success.
through the disappointments of life
you will find another way to be happy

even if

lived and loved the fast and hard -
the slow and easy way.

© 2006-2009 Danna Williams. Vol. 4 Sense: A Collection of Poems.

Pending Review: “Lovedoll Desperation”

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Desperate Teenage Lovedolls (1984)

Lovedoll Desperation

Back to back denials of eating flesh
confound love for the young plastic lovedoll.
It comes to life-a civilized cannibal with a camera-
eating raw emotions, spooning heart and liver
to a rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack pumping hormones
and teenage sex through speakers in our heads.
“Lovedoll’s so punk, it doesn’t even know it,”
never escapes lips frozen in a frame like words-
pinned under glass for human display
in a museum curated by monarch butterflies.

Addendum: The above free verse pending review for publication (since October 21) is in no way associated with the last post. The title and first two lines are completely coincidental. But coincidence is cool sometimes, isn’t it?

LastFM\”Ballad of a Lovedoll\” by Redd Kross (Desperate Teenage Lovedoll OST+)

In The Meantime…

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Lately I’ve been writing more short fiction than poetry. I’m currently working on a short story inspired by familial culture, food, and street art – which may be ready in time for the Austin Chronicle short story contest. In the meantime, read my poems and prose at haggardandhalloo.com. The latest?

Wall Art @ Emo's: The Swinging Flintstones & Rubbles

BDS&M Public Service Announcement: “Love Hurts”

Talking with one of the publishers this weekend, and meeting with his friend and H&H reader reminded me how much I enjoy being one of their “regulars”. Check out other work at the site “publishing creative and contemporary writing since 1995″, and feel free to make a donation to support future publication – online and in print.

Lost & Found Part 2: “Subway Sketch” by Renée Valmont

Sketch by Cully/ChildOfAtom (flickr.com)

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Subway Sketch by Renée Valmont

It was 7:30 a.m. eastern standard time on a bright September day in 2001.

Jaime was a busboy and dishwasher at the Swedish Cafe in Manhattan, on the first floor of the Sony building. He hoped he would be missing the breakfast rush, but the cafe was busy this time of year, selling coffee cakes and other Swedish style pastries to mostly commuting patrons who somehow didn’t have time to make breakfast. And they always looked like they were running late. There were a few regulars who worked in the building, and they never seemed rushed.

Jaime usually prided himself on being like the regulars, but not this morning. This was the first time he was late for work.

It bothered him, and he and Lydia had their first big fight because of it. He overslept because she had disconnected the alarm clock the afternoon before to listen to the portable stereo she bought from a thrift store. She told her new lover she meant to plug his alarm clock back in the worn socket, but somehow forgot. She appeared nonchalant – detached from considerate thought – when he confronted her about it.

Maybe because she was always running late. Maybe because she didn’t own an alarm clock or watch. His lover had a complete disregard for timeliness, and he prided himself on being punctual. But her cool, detached demeanor vanished as soon as he accused her of being “a spoiled Mexican princess.”

Somehow his anger subsided as he walked down the street, three blocks up and down the stone steps, and as he entered the subway stop he decided to draw another picture of his muse – the careless girlfriend with an angry face. He couldn’t forget that face, which turned a plum red when it was upset by something or someone. When he could afford new paint supplies, the subway sketch of Lydia would become a painting.

He didn’t possess much in the tiny one-room flat and his supplies were limited for a dedicated artist, but the soft-spoken Guatemalan painter missed the bedside lamp that provided the only light when he was the most inspired to sketch his thoughts and dreams – in the early hours of the morning. The light bothered his live-in girlfriend, and she convinced him to place it on the table she had moved in, below the apartment’s only window. Since Lydia moved in last month, his life had become full of light – and simply complicated. He began noticing things he had taken for granted before she moved in. Like the fact that he was missing a rug on the apartment’s aged hardwood floor.

“I will buy a rug for this floor,” Lydia announced after complaining about plucking splinters out of the soles of her feet. Jaime wore slippers.

He accepted the rug. He accepted all of her idiosyncrasies, and all the female clutter in his bathroom. Their bathroom now. A disrespectful co-worker (who whistled at Lydia when she brought Jaime the sketch pad he had forgotten to bring on his last weekend subway trip), asked him if she was “high maintenance”. Jaime didn’t quite understand the slang until Lydia explained it last night, offended- then amused.

Lydia was the daughter of a pottery artist from Mexico City, and she moved to Los Estados Unidos when she was 17, college bound. She told Jaime, after the first time they made love, that she wished she was born with the hands of an artist, like him and her father. Or at least the mind of a poet. Long ago she had accepted that she lacked the gift – and the patience – for creative writing. And she was a grammatical taskmaster according to her students. That was how they met. She was a public school teacher, moonlighting as an adult education English instructor, and Jaime was one of the sudents who called her “The Dragon Lady” behind her back.

He let slip her nickname when they were eating Chinese takeout. One night in class, a thirty-something businessman from Spain pointed out to Jaime that she was wearing chopticks in her hair, and had a visible tattoo of a dragon on her little brown left leg. Both men thought it was odd because she was definitely not from the Orient. Jaime learned later that it was Henna art, a temporary tattoo that faded like his contempt for her abrasive teaching methods. He stopped referring to her as “The Dragon Lady” when his employer at the hotel commented how much his English had improved. While the English Verb Drill Sergeant casually sat on top of her desk, legs crossed, Jaime quietly sketched her tattooed leg and muttered irregular conjugations with the rest of the class. He rarely had trouble with verbs because she was his personal tutor now that class was over and they were together.

But that erasable pen sketch wasn’t Jaime’s first drawing of Lydia. On the first day of class she was late, feverishly writing barely decipherable code on the blackboard. The older, impatient students fidgeted and started conversations with strangers – strangers who became allies against the rude young woman who didn’t even announce herself when she entered the room late – almost 15 minutes late! Jaime didn’t think much of his new English teacher, but he was reserved among strangers, so kept to himself those first few weeks of instruction. That first night he whipped out his sketch pad and drew a picture of his teacher. Not one of those funny caricatures, but a delicate drawing of her naked backside. He imagined her naked, with her hair still up in a loose bun as it was that first night and many nights since. It wasn’t a student crush or fantasy, but something he drew to pass the time.

He showed her the sketch after they were no longer student and teacher – after she moved in, months after they had started dating – when he knew she wouldn’t be offended, but flattered.

It was 6:00 am when Lydia left, and she was running late to her first Reading class at P.S. 117 in Jamaica Queens. Jaime imagined her hurriedly putting on lipstick at the bus stop a few blocks south of their apartment. Jaime imagined her face flushed and beautiful, her little legs rushing along that busy sidewalk. He began sketching the morning memory and her imagined face, minutes before the previously silent passenger beside him shouted “Oh, God, no!”

Jaime attempted to move away from the distraction who was listening to a walkman radio, but a few minutes later the strange man yanked out his earplugs, grabbed his arm and cried out – “They’ve hit the towers!”

“Terrorists I bet. Those fucking bastards!” The man didn’t seem crazy, but unsettled. His face was almost the same angry plum red color as Lydia’s that morning.

He would never forget that face.

A painting of that angry face rests on an easel next to the table Lydia left behind when she moved to Texas two years later. “A parting gift for him,” she told the movers. The gift table defies gravity with the weight of sketch books. Inside one of those books is an unfinished sketch of a former lover.

© 2006 Renée Valmont/Danna Williams

Lost & Found Part 1: “What The Training Bra Taught Me” by Renée Valmont

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I thought another story was lost from the last move and a P.C. crash, but luckily found a personal treasure on gmail – a lot of poems and a few stories that are being shaped for publication today. The following short, short story may never see print but I have a strong attachment to it. Maybe because it’s a (slightly) fictionalized account about a transitional time in my childhood, and how one adult seemed to understand what I was going through without giving me a hug and telling me it was going to be OK when maybe it wasn’t. Her love was tough, but I always felt loved, and it taught me that being tough doesn’t make me any less a woman. I miss her everyday, and this month marks five years without her in my day to day life, encouraging me to read and learn more, to write more, and to give more to the great-grandchildren who sometimes remind me of her in little ways.

Why am I suddenly teary eyed? The next introduction won’t be so sentimental and mushy. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

What The Training Bra Taught Me by Renée Valmont

Like all adolescent girls at the threshold of womanhood, I have to buy a training bra.

I don’t understand why it’s called a training bra. Riding down the Eastex Freeway to Parkdale Mall in my grandmother’s blue ‘68 Chevy Impala I ask the question that is burning a hole in my brain all Saturday morning: “Why do they call it a training bra, Grandma?”

“It’s called a training bra so your breasts won’t grow wild,” my sister Marley jokes.

Grandma actually agrees with her.

I’m 11-years-old going to the 6th grade soon, and Marley is five years older and her boobs are gianormous. (Is that even a word?) Anyway, she’s popular and trendy, and because she goes to Beaumont Senior High School and gets to wear lipstick. I’m a little jealous, so Mama buys me Bonne Belle Lipsmackers for my birthday. They come in all kinds of flavors, like strawberry, grape, watermelon… And as we ride in the air condition-less, vinyl upholstered back seat, I’m piling delicious artificially flavored grape lipgloss on my lips. Yummy…

We’re finally at Parkdale Mall, and I’m still not convinced I need a training bra. I’d rather go to the Goldmine Arcade at the mall than shop for undergarments, but Marley has to get some back-to-school clothes, and Grandma insists that I’m getting too big not to wear a bra.

And you don’t argue with Grandma. She’s one tough old broad. When my friends call for me and she answers the door or the phone, they’re either scared witless of the doll-like Indian woman holding a Winston cigarette in one hand and screen door handle with the other; or her hoarse, mannish voice that my friends always assume belongs to my grandpa, Papa. But Papa has a sweet tenor’s voice. My sister and I always laugh when Grandma sings “Happy Birthday” to one of us – the one time of the year she will dare sing out loud.

But we don’t laugh when Grandma tells us we’re going to J.C. Penney to buy clothes – and my first bra.

For any 11-year-old girl on the threshold of womanhood, J.C. Penney’s Lingerie department is a frightening alien experience. But I survive it somehow, with Grandma holding my hand. OK – she isn’t literally holding my hand. We aren’t the touchy-feely kinda folks. But she asks me, nicely, to follow her to the land of bras. While my sister is free to browse the Junior/Miss department, Grandma embarrasses me by asking a saleslady for help in Lingerie. I am already freaked out by the pale mannequins whose lower limbs are missing. Their upper torsos are wrapped with natural and synthetic fibers designed to bind their fake plaster breasts. Freaky.

My mother and grandmother are petite women. But Grandma has a big bosom, unlike Mama who balloons to a B-cup after the birth of two kids. Grandma is always in search for the perfect support bra, and Playtex 18-hour is her brand of choice these days. So while picking out something for herself, she makes me try on different training bras. One of them has those cute, pink flower accents. Then you have your regular polyfill, criss-cross action, which is perfect for a practical girl like me. What am I going to do with little flower accents, anyway?

It seems like we have spent forever in that department, and I ask her if we can buy the plain bra that doesn’t seem so… unnecessary.

Grandma insists we buy both bras. It’s her J.C. Penney card, so I don’t argue.

I forget to mention that when I look in the dressing room’s three-way mirror trying on both bras again to make sure they fit, I almost feel like a woman. I also dread going to the gym locker room to change on my first day at Beaumont Junior High.

So going to the mall and buying bras for the first time with your grandmother can be almost as cool as playing Frogger at the arcade. OK – not really. But to reward me for almost reaching womanhood, Grandma takes me to Waldenbooks and buys me a Judy Blume book I hadn’t read yet – It’s Not The End of The World.

~For M.V.W. (February 13, 1913 – September 27, 2003) with eternal gratitude.

© 2006 Renée Valmont/Danna Williams