The Words I Leave

I can't really remember when I discovered the magic of poetry but I like to think it happened in the wrinkled pages of Dudley Randall's anthology The Black Poets. There in those pages is where I found Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown and Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, who was searching for the sacred words to prevent destruction and usher in resurrection. Truth is his words, the ones I recited out loud at night in my dorm room at the predominantly white university I attended, were the sacred words that saved my life. Literally saved my life, and I'm sure the lives of many others in years before I existed and in years after.
I had already devoured James Baldwin and because of him, I knew I wanted to be a writer. But poetry? I didn't quite understand it. Couldn't get my head around it, though I loved Edgar Allen Poe and Robert Frost. But I was trying to sing my song and I was searching desperately for voices that could harmonize with mine.
Baraka was one of those poets whose voice I tried to sing until I could sing on my own. I relished his words coming out of my mouth because they felt beautiful. They felt like love.
And I was looking for love. I was looking for black love in a white world that felt cold sometimes on that campus, a place where when I spoke, things came out discordant to others and I ended up confused. I was trying to speak my world to those who denied my world even existed.
During my sophomore year, I attended a lecture. This was a time of great debate about political correctness and multiculturalism. One of the other black students had tried to petition for a black studies major on campus. And here I sat, the only black student, if I remember, among a sea of white faces, listening to a white guy whose name I can't remember talk about the wonders of Western Civilization. He was saying something in the way about how teaching black history would just make black people angry and institute victimhood and how white males had been pilloried and debased in the ongoing debates about multiculturalism. I found it ironic that he was accusing black people of playing the victim card while playing the victim card himself. I also found it strange that he could find no place in his intellectual argument for the contributions of black people. Our literature wasn't good enough, he seemed to be saying.
Whatever because I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew I came from a history of writers because I knew Baraka. So I went back to The Black Poets and other things and sought the beauty in the language, our language, the language I wanted to be a part of, if I could just find my voice. Harmonize.
I wanted to be a poet.
The years I first discovered Baraka, I also discovered people like Jessica Care Moore and Saul Williams and I wanted to grab hold of the stage and spit fire like they did. But they weren't me and so I typed up bullshit on the computer right before an open mic and dared to call it poetry.
I took a creative writing class and wrote self-righteous rants and called it poetry until a poetry friend of mine told me to read Langston Hughes a little more closely, see that he wrote out of his own experience, that his power came not from how much he shouted but in how much he found joy even when there was pain.
I wrote poetry on and off for much of my adult life, some of it good, some of it awful. I kept writing and I kept reading tons of anthologies and I would read Baraka's poem, "Ka'Ba."
I could say that I was drawn to Baraka for his anger but he wasn't just angry for anger's sake. He was an artist who cultivated his anger to make work that was powerful. He was trying to say something in the way of things in a way that we could hear. Because he wanted us to hear.
And I heard.
Baraka was a complex man, one whose views I sometimes disagreed with. But I think he loved a world that could be better. He left behind words I cleave to because there's love tangled in those words.
I am a poet. I can say that now, after years of pretending to be something else. And I've found my voice, after years of singing with others, and now marching out on my own.
I think, like him, I'm trying to use my words to paint a better world, leave things a bit brighter than when I got here.