Writing from ongoing experience with the incarcerated as a poet and teacher, Ralph Nazareth offers this detailed and
moving critique of ibn Kenyatta’s collection (originally appearing in the journal Socialism and Democracy, capturing a stoic
compassion and inclusive humanism comparable to the work and commentary of other members of the world's largest prison population, such as Mumia Abu Jamal and Mohamedou Ould Slahi.--RM
poems for an imperiled world
ibn Kenyatta
Xlibris (2014)
This slender but
tensile volume of twenty-five poems contains “passionate songs” sung from
“above and beyond the blues/but still underneath the top heap/of the bottom
dung.”
Kenyatta,
prisoner No. 74A3701, incarcerated for over four decades, strives “ever upward
always towards the light.” Ceaselessly soaring, he says, “mylife/mylife is/and
mylife’s song speaks to me/‘Carry on!’”
His expansive
vision is a testament to the courage of a man who consistently flies above the
turbulence on the ground. Shaped by an acute awareness of human and planetary
disturbances, he issues prophetic warnings about real and present dangers and
exhorts us to “carry on” with love.
A Magisterial Defiance of Assumptions
One may be
surprised to hear such a voice emerge from the exile of a long prison term. It
would be natural to expect a man interminably immured to write with an
edge—sharp, ironic, and bitter—to rail at the dark fates, at injustice and
cruelty, at the scandalous abuse of power and the Law. It may perhaps be also
reasonable to look here for an owning up to a darkness within—a deed, an
irreversible loss of self and other, a terrible and prolonged disruption—and
more—possibly remorse, or at least a hint of it, a deeply suggestive trail of a
move to recover lost ground.
There’s little
in Kenyatta’s work that satisfies these traditional expectations born of an
unexamined set of assumptions about society and the system of criminal justice
it has long maintained at grave material and spiritual cost. His poems, on the
other hand, are philosophical and reflective, even magisterial, touched at
times with the sadness at the self-inflicted wounds leading us to the edge of
collective, planetary catastrophe. Perhaps the unfailingly lofty rhetoric and
vision are precisely the result of the man having spent long years in the vise of
suffering—a vision that has been wrung out of pain. Perhaps it is the deepest
response to a living death.
Personal to the Planetary
In the ringing
credo of his preface, Kenyatta asserts: “If we are to save ourselves from ourselves, that is, the planet from the
worst that is within us, each of us must look deep within, first, if we are to stop the VIOLENCE: our overbearing
self-interest: greed, lust, hatred, prejudice, larceny, jealousy, envy, etc.
then we must reach out and ‘grab hold of the hand’ of one other human being in order to help spread the
Word. Love. Peace. Respect.” He continues unwavering: “We must stop, look, and
listen to the silent voice within our own hearts. the world is crying out to
us. And Mother Nature is calling each one of us out—by name.”
Do not ask what
this man did to deserve an unimaginably long term in prison. Do not ask what
may be wrong with a blind system of justice that subjects humans to inhuman
treatment. Raise yourself, this book seems to urge, to another level and see that
you are stewards of a great treasure, a planet facing imminent danger, our
“playground” spiraling down into a “place of contentious strife within a living
hell.”
Kenyatta does
not harbor “illusions” that his poems will have a world-transforming effect,
for he knows all too well that only a few will heed the call to do the work
needed to tend this “garden” and restore it to health. He merely offers his
poems as part of his “humble expression of service rendered toward the Human Family, in my own way.”
A Global Womb Scorched by Hubristic Suns
Those of us who
will take the time to listen to Kenyatta will above all else hear his call,
more urgent than stern, often poignant, to take responsibility for our lives.
The boundaries of what we narrowly see as criminal behavior get vastly expanded
in Kenyatta’s profoundly humanistic vision, which warns us against the
arrogance of “our god-creating heads.” Unlike the evil functionaries at the
Nuremberg Trials who, to a man, said, “I am not responsible,” Kenyatta would
have us see that we are all responsible for the ecological holocaust raging all
around us, the denudation of the earth, the “injured womb.” Our “projections”
and our captivity “within our own ‘event horizon,’” our hubris at thinking of
ourselves as “our own suns,” our all-too-blind flitting in the “amniotic
darkness of our inner self-cocoon” lead inevitably to little more than “a
made-up and make believe world we call human
life/where we are its soul-creators of our dreams as well as our nightmares.”
Kenyatta is a
teacher who feels no need to apologize for his didacticism. In fact, his
doomsday perspective—that we are on the edge of planetary- and
self-extinction—makes it imperative for him to speak. And fulminate he does, a
veritable voice in the wilderness, as he presses us to redeem ourselves by
seeing through the “pseudo-games of mesmerism” of the “devil-mind… disguised as
flesh and blood,” the fatal “self-imposed imprisonment.” He refuses to back off
from his unrelenting critique. His wailing is suffused with a world sorrow, too
big, almost uncontainable, in the face of which the pain of his own
incarceration does not seem worth even a passing mention. His prophetic task is
to bring all his fury and passion to make us see our Public SHAME:
…haven’t we for too long now been
fighting and slaughtering one another
over the same old divisive theologies of
religion
over the same squandered national
resources
the same impoverished and land-mined
territories
the same chemically laden food supplies
the same oil slicks in already polluted
waters
the same blood diamonds and tarnished
gold
AD
NAUSEAM
(“Joy
Ride”)
The Motionless Explosion of the Moment
As we come under
the sway of Kenyatta’s doleful catalogs, we sense at a level deeper than
immediate despair, a spiritual instinct which heals divisions and points to an
integrated being founded on hope, respect and love. Just as we have no one to
blame but ourselves for the “gathering gloom,” we have no need for an agency
save the one that stems from our own will to fully enter the freedom of the
moment.
Kenyatta’s
vision, equally open to excremental and redemptive elements, hence mature and
tough, rises to rhapsodic levels as he exhorts us in his poem “Imitation of
Life” to bend all our forces to the kind of retrieval our lives depend on for
meaning and sustenance:
in spite of the unspeakable wretchedness
that is felt as our lives
in spite of all the physical horrors ever
to be visited upon human flesh
in spite of our deepest longings for our
invitational respect toward Death
we still must will ourselves to live for
just one more moment
to relish the baptismal wholeness in its
“motionless explosion”
let life live its own moment-to-moment
is-ness
it stills any run-on fears that may stalk
the empty corridors
of a self-imprisoning mind
which can only entangle itself in its own
ever-impending and self-made web called
time
and so now with a cleared vision we can
do this we can scale this summit
we must will ourselves to live just one
more day
and then to repeat this same feat again
and again
and to mark each experience as being a
new beginning
in our hopes that a possible change will
arrive
and Faith will find us worthy
Lest we mistake
this fervor for an all-too-easy transformation of the myth of Sisyphus or an
illusory act of cheering ourselves up as we stare into the impending storm,
Kenyatta warns in “The Waterbearer”:
but to consciously live out each moment
to moment of each day
requires such supernal strength and
courage
like that of the great Waabazee River of
Ifundiland
which spurns the attractive force of
gravity
by initially flowing its waters upstream
on its perennial journey to the sea….
Defying Panoptic Gravity
To learn how to
walk amid adversity, and to continue to walk in the face of the apocalypse,
Kenyatta says requires that we practice the art of “defying gravity,” an art
one masters, if at all, by a “cleared vision” which helps us “act always ‘as if’ everything still
mattered in this life/even if she or he inevitably saw no hope in physical
matter itself/for the sun hasn't given up on us yet/and neither has the moon.”
 |
| Simone Weil |
What makes it
possible for us to believe that “everything still mattered in life”? How do we
defy gravity, which we must do if we are to walk, and continue walking, that
is, if we are to be fully human? Kenyatta alternates between the poles of the
agency of self-will and what he names in “Prayer Beads” the “caring power
called Grace.” Reminiscent of the assertion of the great French mystic Simone Weil who said that grace is the act of coming down without weight, Kenyatta’s
statement of belief, at the end of a sequence of poems that have taken the
reader through the desert of the spirit, holds that ultimately human agency
must be seen to be part of a larger web of forces. In this web we, small “as a
tiny grain of sand blown across the Kalahari,” are upheld by the entire
Universe, hence unburdened of our own specific gravity, a universe whose story
is no larger or more glorious than “your story and my story/and all our
stories,” yet without which our stories are incomplete and, like Yeats’ center,
“cannot hold.”
To be mindful of
this radical inter-relatedness, Kenyatta realizes, is an imperative. In a
brilliantly creative use of possibly the only image in the book that reminds us
of his life under constant surveillance in prison, he pairs it with Mystery.
Thus:
anklebraceletmonitoring Mystery is this
we’re all under
authority to get this
human life right
Not even here,
where the oppressive machinery threatens to shackle the human with its iron
grip, is Kenyatta willing to compromise his secular mystical vision, a deep
earth spirituality, that seeks the nurturing reassurance of two hands, the
cosmic and the human, holding each other in inextricable love, the only way “to
get this human life right.”
Double-Consciousness In a Time of
Resurgent Darkness
I’m writing this
response to Kenyatta’s poems in the wake of the brutal deaths of Michael
Brown,
Eric Garner and other besieged Blacks; the unveiling of the continuing horror
at Riker’s Island and other penitentiaries across this land; in the era of mass
incarceration, the “
New Jim Crow,” and the systematic attempt at
disenfranchising an entire group of people that was reluctantly brought into
the body politic by the Voting Rights Act in 1965. In other words, I’m writing
this in “dark times.” As a long-time volunteer teacher at a maximum-security
prison in New York, I’m writing this with some understanding of the “dark
places” we call our “correctional facilities.”
I feel the need
to say that I experience a slight shudder of dissonance between the nightmare
that is our criminal justice system and Kenyatta’s vision, formed in the dark
coils of that gulag, that pushes us all to “get human life right.” Where
dissembling in the name of survival is the norm, Kenyatta refuses to wear “the
mask” crafted in the days of the old Jim Crow and memorialized in Lawrence
Dunbar’s famous poem. Falling in line or shuffling along with those who “shade
our eyes” and feed the culture of “grins and lies” is an option he forcefully rejects.
Similarly, he pushes aside W.E.B. Dubois’ “veil” and chooses to stride into the
open country of his soul, free of the “double-consciousness” and the sense of
“always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others… the feeling of
two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body…”
I’m searching
here for a way to register my mild surprise and disappointment at Kenyatta not
openly acknowledging in his work the excruciating weight of his life behind
bars. That I am not able to take a definite stand regarding this apparent
lacuna in his presentation of himself to the outside world must mean something,
not the least of which is the unfathomable complexity of the way in which we
human beings deal with our respective situations.
Love’s Abiding Patience
Last week when I
was back at the prison, I shared this ambivalence about Kenyatta’s work with
the men in my class. As always, they were provocative and perceptive in their
response. But what one of them said stands out for me as the answer that should
still my questions, at least for the moment. He said, “You know, Nazareth, you
get to a point… well, you get to the point you’re just too tired to go over the
shit year after year. You get over it. You settle down to something. Maybe
you’ll call it love. And that’s all that matters….”
Now that I look
back on Kenyatta’s poetry, it seems most likely that he has attained a genuine
transcendence through whatever one may choose to name it—in his case, perhaps
love in its many guises.
am i not also your Brother
am i not also your Sister
under the penumbra of an all-embracing
Universal Love
The solidarity
within human community is one of its faces. A union with the reality of the
spirit is another. It helps Kenyatta to refuse to be reduced to a simple
material existence, which runs the risk of being its own prison.
“Come out of the
circle of time,” says Rumi, “and into the circle of love.” Perhaps that is what
Kenyatta is doing, as he says, “in my own way.”
Ralph Nazareth,
Ph.D.
Professor,
English Department
Nassau Community
College, NY
_______
Further Information:
Find out more about the current state of criminal justice, ending
the school-to-prison pipeline and other reforms to the American penal system at:
On the
Count--The Prison & Criminal Justice Report
Resolving
the rift between our accepted notions of the Civilized and the Wild is the subject for this year’s summer poetry service at the Unitarian Universalist
Congregation. The theme was suggested by Reverend Frances Sink’s reading of The Practice of the Wild (Counterpoint,
2010), an essay collection from poet Gary Snyder.
While Tomorrowland toler-ates a given natural habitat and its denizens as no more than decorative accents
to a human imposition on the landscape (save for some birds,
the only evidence of Nature is the prairie surrounding the city), last year’s Interstellar (Paramount/Warner Bros.) espouses an almost strident hostility to the ecosystem
as a whole.
Other than humans, not another living thing,
save for trees and crops, appear in the film (Cooper’s farm doesn’t even
have a dog), as if, once more (though to far less glitzy effect) the world is pared down to only what humans can get from it—a sentiment
emphasized when the utilitarianized earthly environment is reproduced with
faithful insipidness within an O'Neill-style orbital habitat that
doesn’t even offer the solace of parklands.
This
is not an inconceivable prospect. In The Forge and the Crucible (University
of Chicago Press, 1979), Micea Eliade’s overview of alchemical
thought, he observes how early metal-working cultures the world over often
maintained a mindful veneration of blacksmiths for their skill in fabricating
both hand tools and weaponry—corresponding to the creative and destructive capacities in
us all. Agrarian societies in Europe projected their awareness of natural
cycles in reproduction and agriculture to mining activities such that when a
vein was exhausted, it was thought to be simply a matter of closing up the
site, like a fallow field, to give its ores time to replenish themselves—maybe erroneous, but a belief indicative of a patient and cooperative, rather than exploitive,
attitude rarely seen today.
