Babbling publicly into your phone the tragedy’s yours, and yours alone: messages from your dysfunctional city inflicted in Afro-eccentricity.
Turn off your phone and spare us the drama. Look for change from the Lord (not Obama)… Quit twitching your neckline, stop making that face there’s nothing you merit because of your race; no right to entitlement. Take it to God— we hope He will change you, but spare the rod.
And we pray He does change you, put “yes” in your can; and that change that’s left over (from Savior to man) might enlighten your heritage, lighten your load help you calculate more or less what you are owed in dollars or dignity (afro-semantics) while twittering radically militant antics.
A debt unforgiven: this claim someone owes you some change in a can that black history shows you your hopeful presumption is scant reparation for ghetto entitlement fouling our nation.
Go harvest your madness and reap what you’ve sown now that tares have sprung up as you blab on your phone now that reapers are ready—the data-plan paid and our melanin levels beginning to fade…
I’ll shout from your rooftop until you’ve heard and the crackers get fed to the mockingbird.
Un joven Marxista peludo (mejor dicho: tirano barbudo) adornó camisetas, también pantaletas – irónico chiste agudo.
Maldito malandro Guevara alabado por voz y guitarra, fue la gran obra-maestra (pero no de la diestra) y queda la pata con garra.
A Marxist Messiah namedCHE
was mistaken (by night) for the Day.
Bringing light to the masses
(who wore their sunglasses)
the luminance faded away…
The image of CHE on a shirt
always triggers my right to assert
that the crime of the Left
is not property theft,
but Idolatry: blind and overt.
The communist rock-star Ernesto
never dreamed that his mug would be blessed so –
re-branded revision,
immune to derision.
Would history ever have guessed so?
The militant monogram CHE
was perceived as the herald of day-
from a murderous tyrant
to Christ-like aspirant:
reality withered away.
Confronting postmodernism’s strident “no”, blithely pessimistic in its desire for organic negation of its own existence, Femi Abubakar’s Manual of Dispossessed Motherlandsrepeatedly says “yes”. Throughout Abubakar’s collection of poems, affirmations, and acceptance are lines of flight that ally “with striated territorialities of occupation” harmed by the system and its outmoded, “illogic of whiteness.”
When Abubakar arrived in Omaha in 1994, the same year that Reagan-era poultry farms were finally deconstructed, he initially “refused” to identify as an African, and, instead, “celebrated whatever was not Eurocentric,working in meat-processing and youth centers… and thinking the only community possible was a community of resistance.” Now he admits that “poetry is also a city,” and writes of the diverse cities, past and present, inside and outside of Greater Africa—of the way that identity, for people of color, actual and virtual, has intersected the orthodoxies of the African age and fractured and liberated its content, both bride-price and wedding guests. In syntax that is intentional in its non-whiteness, Abubakar acknowledges that a sentence and grammar itself can contain or oppress. He writes, for example, after Mugabe’s “Non-native Agricultural Appropriations Act,” of:
[…] the exhausted government ministers who, as development loans defaulted and life blossomed into a bloodless auction, had to choose between educating their children in the U.S. and selling their Mercedes fleet or acquiring the confiscated farms of people who might and did hurt their wives and mistresses, who made the decisionless-decision of continued personal enrichment or the impersonal impoverishing of a racist agricultural sector that regularly humiliated Africans for being African and for being married, for having women of no color who had children or women of any color who had children by many fathers or black women who had children with fathers who were not white.
Recollected in diaspora: The Bride Price
White goats, pale camels, filthy sheep and colorless apes of finance hail the bride-to-be.
They gather in the lengthening shadows of the West bleating and chattering in that unsafe space where colonial powers hoard deceptions.
Silent, in her hut, bound, excised, sewn shut, she sits sullen, coagulating: an African body, a fetishized continent commodified non-event of bargained victimhood
and among the bloodied baobabs and dusty thorns we wait for a wedding to burst forth with ululations of victory from innumerable hot gun-barrels.
Femi Abubakar is an Omaha-based poet and essayist, and a professor at the Diaspora Arts Collective. His works include The Camels of Ouagadougou (Nomad Press, 2003), My Transplanted Nation (Inshallah Press, 2011), and the 2014 Trinidad/Tobago GRIOT award-winning Beads for Slaughter (Carnival Books, 2016), which Shoshana Mandelbaum described in the New York Times as “bold, beautiful, challenging verse that bankrupts the political economy of poetics and of art itself.”
Abubakar’s poetry (he writes mainly in French) has been translated into a number of languages, including Tuareg, English, Basque, and Arabic and his chapbook Tea in the Desert (2013) was published by the collective Djema el F’naa in Amazigh translation. Abubakar’s other chapbooks include Al Haji Masra’s Wedding, and Holy War of Poetry.
In 2016, Abubakar was diagnosed with highly-aggressive case of Trump Derangement Complex which led to his work on the politics of resistance in the age of tolerance. According to critic Idris Washington-Jones, Abubakar’s work “butchers the fatted calf of poetry and culture as we know them.”
( Editor: Harrison Tsinakut-O’odla )
Harrison Tsinakut-O’odla is a First Nations poet born on land belonging to the Hootenani Nation. He grew up in Ininew, Oji-Crow, Dene, and the Ts’msyen Tsimshian territory of Kitsum’k/Kitsalas. He also lived on Pemmikan, Snuneymxw, Qw’tsun, Anishnabg, Ha’denoyni and Wendat/Tlohtià:ke. He identifies as a white woman who voted for Donald Trump. His preferred pronoun is Kootu.
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