Mosaic

ISSUE TWENTY THREE

FALL 2008

RELEVANT LITERATURE

SIX DOLLARS

THE NEW NEW LIT

KALISHA BUCKHANON OPAL PALMER ADISA
SOMEBODY SCREAM
1
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humor.” —Birmingham Times

2 mosaicmagazine.org
Available in trade paperback and as eBooks

www.hachettebookgroup.com Hachette Book Group

 no.
Content
23

The Holistic Writer

An Interview with Kalisha Buckhanon ................................ 10
by Tara Betts

The Darker Mask

Allegory for a New Literature ............................................. 26
by Christopher Chambers

Healing Words
an Interview with Opal Palmer Adisa ................................. 32
by D. Scot Miller

Excerpt
Conception by Kalisha Buckhanon................................... 16

Poems by Opal Palmer Adisa

Breaking Point I ............................................................... 35
Breaking Point IV ............................................................. 37

Cover photo: Isadore Howard

3
 Reviews ................................................................................................ 18

Conduit: Poems
by Khadijah Queen
Akashic Books

Gomer’s Song
By Kwame Dawes
Akashic Books

Kinky Gazpacho
By Lori L. Tharps
Atria

Gentleman Jigger, A Novel of the Harlem Renaissance

By Richard Bruce Nugent
Da Capo

Say You’re One Of Them

By Uwem Akpan
Little, Brown and Company

Slumberland
By Paul Beatty
Bloomsbury

Somebody Scream!: Rap Music’s Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power
By Marcus Reeves
Faber and Faber

When the Black Girl Sings

By Bil Wright
Simon & Schuster

4 mosaicmagazine.org
HOLDING
PATTERN
STORIES BY
JEFFERY
RENARD
ALLEN
THE STREETS OF CHICAGO:
“Subtly otherworldly, each
tale is electric with the rising
tension that proceeds stormy
weather; each tale is a veritable
boxing match, as characters
REAL AND LUMINOUSLY IMAGINED trapped in impossible situations
feint, jab, and retreat.”
“Jeffery Renard Allen’s poetic vision is stunning, tragic,
wildly funny and most of all alive. He is the rare writer —BOOKLIST
who, by creating a wholly unique and surreal dream- (STARRED REVIEW)
scape, illuminates human reality on the deepest level.
He is also the rare writer who borrows from no one “The prodigiously talented
and doesn’t pander to anyone.” Jeffrey Renard Allen is without
question one of our most
—MARY GAITSKILL
important writers. His novel,
Rails Under My Back, kicked ass,
JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN is the author of the and these tough beautiful
novel Rails Under My Back and two collections stories are a gift. You cannot
finish this collection without
of poetry. Allen was born and raised in Chicago.
being dazzled by Allen’s
He teaches in the Writing Program at the New manifold talents.”
School. 5
—JUNOT DÍAZ

Available at bookstores and online www.graywolfpress.org

 Managing Editor Felicia Pride
Short Story/Poetry Editor Sheree Renee Thomas renne Thomas
Copy Editor Tawny Pruitt

Publisher Ron Kavanaugh

Communications Coordinator Precenda Griffin

Mosaic Literary Magazine (ISSN 1531-0388) is published four times

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 New York Times Bestselling Author

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8 mosaicmagazine.org

J. A. Barnes is a novelist, playwright, blogger, and
freelance writer living in Central Ohio. She has
published several novels for young readers and won
first place in the Atlanta Film Festival screenwriting
award. Her most recent work is a novel about the
Civil War published as a blog.
Adisa Vera Beatty* is a writer and educator living
in Brooklyn, New York. Her poetry has appeared in
Callaloo, The Painted Bride Quarterly and L-I-N-K-
E-D, the online literary journal of Spelman College.
Tara Betts teaches creative writing at Rutgers Uni-
versity. A longtime contributor to Mosaic, Tara’s
poetry has appeared in Essence, Callaloo, Drum
Voices Revue and several anthologies.
Jada Bradley (jadabradley.com) is a Washington
DC-based writer who enjoys telling stories in formal
and informal ways. Her work has appeared in The
Washington Post and online.
Georgetown University professor Christopher Cham-
bers is the author of the Angela Bivens crime novels
as well as short stories published in magazines like
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Francis
Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope All-Story. His upcoming
work includes the historical novel Yella Patsy’s Boys,
the novella Amos n Andy and the graphic novel
Gangsterland.
Contributors
C. Chekejai Coley is a freelance writer and the
director of 2nd Rising Publications. She has writ-
ten poems, plays, reviews, short shories and artist
bios. She assisted in the editing of a newly released
African American history textbook and is currently
working on the publication of her first children’s
book.
Athena Dixon is currently an adjunct professor at
several schools in southern New Jersey. Her poetry
has appeared in Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian
Culture, blossombones, The Amistad and The Pen-
guin Review.
Sidik Fofana has written several publication includ-
ing the Source, Vibe, and allhiphop.com. His work
appears in the recently released The Black Male
Handbook: Blueprint for Life edited by Kevin Pow-
ell (Simon & Schuster
Rachel Finn is a Chicago-based food writer. She is
currently working on a project about identity and
the Food of the African Diaspora and writing a book
about dates (phoenix dactylifera).
D. Scot Miller is Bay Area writer, teacher, and visual
artist. On the board of directors to noctunes review.
Writes for many publications. The afro-surreal Knot
Frum Hear, first novel. Just completed a book of
poems: TBD.
9
 the Holistic Writer\\
an Interview with
Kalisha Buckhanon
by Tara Betts

When I was growing up in Kankakee, Illinois, Ka-

lisha Buckhanon and I crossed paths in so many
ways. We were both looking for ways to accomplish
something. When I was on the way out as a high
school senior, I remember seeing her onstage at our
high school’s auditorium and saying that girl is go-
ing places. I remember chatting with her outside
the Kankakee Public Library where I had my first
job, and communicating over the years while she
attended University of Chicago and I was on the
north side attending Loyola University.

We managed to stay in touch. She curated readings

with the likes of Sonia Sanchez, attended school,
worked, and wrote at night. I curated readings and
taught while performing and studying at night. She
came to New York City to work on her MFA in cre-
ative writing. We talked about our love for James
Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, shared meals
and couches on the East Coast and in the Midwest.
After releasing her two novels Upstate and Concep-
tion (both on St. Martin’s Press) and in the middle
Cover photo: Isadore Howard

10 mosaicmagazine.org
11
 of pursuing her PhD, Kalisha Buckhanon took a mo-
ment to talk with me about her work, young peo-
ple, our hometown, black drama, and approaching
the page.
Tara Betts: I remember you saying that you kept
notebooks as a kid. What was writing like for you
when you were a little girl?
Kalisha Buckhanon: It was more random and intui-
tive. Like now, I wrote based upon my emotions, but
my imagination had not yet allowed reality into it. I
didn’t realize that an imagined world could involve
me and the world I experienced or that I could just
write one to involve myself. Consequently, those
early stories are really playful and convoluted, often
with characters who weren’t black, simply because
I rarely encountered books with black people in
them when I was little.
TB: What were your first encounters with black
people in books? I know I always think of dis-
covering Raymond Andrews, Paul Laurence Dun-
bar’s Sport of the Gods and for colored girls who’ve
considered suicide at the Kankakee Public Library,
and Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks
being the two black poets in our high school’s
textbooks.
KB: I must shout from the rooftops that I discov-
ered The Bluest Eye in the Kankakee Public Library
12 mosaicmagazine.org
and it changed my life forever. I was a voracious
reader, but my options were almost always books
about white people, characters, their culture, lan-
guage and speech. The little girl on the cover looked
like me. The people inside talked like me and my
people. That was when I realized that I, too, had
stories to tell.
TB: How has working with young people in-
formed your writing?
KB: I love our black children, but because of my life
trajectories I don’t have the occasion to be around
large groups of them that much. During the rare oc-
casions when the atmosphere is just right in a class-
room, teaching imagination is the way I like to play.
It’s nice to get back to the basics of storytelling the
way children make you do. “The dog is...the man
looks...” I can’t walk into a room full of kids and not
be reminded of the elegant simplicity of poetics. Un-
fortunately, it’s hard to teach writing and language
arts in schools because both activities involve the
intellect and fairly invisible mental processes. Not
only do kids not read nearly as much as they used
to, adults don’t either. What was once one of the
most pleasurable and one of the simplest leisure ac-
tivities one could undertake is now met with a lot of
disdain in the classroom. As a civilization we don’t
even have to read real letters and cards anymore—
we have IM chat and quick texts instead of words
on a page. It’s sad that so much of what makes us
human—that ability to communicate and transmit
to one another using language—has been eroded.
One of the reasons that spiritual motivation, per-
sonal accountability, and drive are always character
builders for me in my work is that I see so much of
that lacking these days in not just children but adults
as well. I’m not always perfect myself in those areas,
but I do wish as a whole we were more conscience
of these traits. The gift of being able to teach writing
is that if you’re good enough to pull it out, most chil-
dren are good enough to express themselves and
those drives to you.
TB: Since your book has had positive reception
from young readers, what responses have you
heard from them?
KB: They love the books! Usually, when I speak to
kids, they are very specific about details and scenes
when they ask questions. While I hate being caught
off guard with something I can’t remember, I am
always impressed! As a doctoral student, one of the
requirements of my oral examination is close read-
ing of a number of books. These children exhibit
skills that make me proud when I am able to talk
to them, in detail, about my books because they
prove they can retain information and be provoked
by a text. I’m not just proud because they are my
books, obviously. I’m also proud that these kids will
actually think hard about literature when they have
something they really want to read. They can and
will get into a story that is not on the big screen, TV,
or the internet. It is still possible.
TB: In Upstate and Conception, you make an ef-
fort to share the voices of both the male and
female character as the main focus of the book.
What was it like to write in the voice of a male
character versus a female character?
KB: I don’t really think that there was a huge dis-
crepancy between them in the way that their voices
came to my head. Of course, I was pulling from dif-
ferent experiences in order to capture those voices.
Many of my own young crushes and boyfriends
certainly came into play, because I do love the lan-
guage of black men. They can talk that talk like no
others can! It was a real challenge to keep the story
going by playing off two characters, often making
quick switches in my head. I think it worked in the
final product.
TB: I enjoyed that both novels featured Natasha
and Shivana speaking and acting like girls that
we’ve known. What are some challenges that you
experienced in doing justice to their voices?
KB: They speak like little girls we’ve known because
I was once one of those little girls. I did not expe-
rience many challenges writing them. They were
both joys to write, straight from the heart. Very close
13
 to me and my heart. In my head both of them al-
ways look like those girls people never bother to
look at. It was nice for me as an older, more mature
writer to recapture the emotional and psychologi-
cal fragility of that age, and bring an understand-
ing to these girls’ lives that is not necessarily there
for them. Ironically, Natasha’s name in Upstate was
Shivana, and my mentor Sapphire was heartbroken
when I changed it to Natasha because she felt is
was too Russian and not African American. She was
right, but it sounded great with Antonio. I am so
happy that I was able to bring that name back in
Conception.
TB: I remember seeing early beginnings of Con-
ception, but I’m sure people would like to know
where you got the idea to explore the different
voices of unborn children.
KB: Yes, I remember you were the first person that
I ever gave pages of Conception, back in 2005, be-
fore you moved to NYC. And I appreciate that early
encouragement on the story because it helped. But
I am privy to the situations facing many of our chil-
dren. I know what they are going through. A lot of
it I have been through myself. “What happens to a
dream deferred?” It’s such a cliché, but Langston
asked a question for the ages. From the opening of
the book, I hope that it is clear that I am explor-
ing the miracle of life and how too many children
I have observed do not understand that they are
14 mosaicmagazine.org
miracles, partially because adults don’t understand
it. It is time for us as adults to step up and get more
involved in the lives of these children. It’s time to
mentor a child, spend more time with your own,
send a nice card to a kid who has accomplished
something, or even just set a positive example for
the young brothers and sisters on the block by
watching language on the street or modeling cour-
teous behavior. We have lost our sense of royalty as
a people, and the unborn child is holding on to that
secret for those who don’t know it yet.
TB: As a result of your first novel and volun-
teering as a mentor for the PEN Prison Writing
Program, you have often been asked about the
prison industrial complex. What observations
became clearer or paralleled the situations you
wrote about after Upstate was released?
KB: After the book was released, it pretty much has
been the same old observations for me. Nothing
changed except at least I had a platform in which
to talk about something that had been on my mind
for a while. And to think that given our upcoming
presidential election, the powers that be have a
large constituency of potential Obama voters right
where they want them. This is an ongoing problem
and situation. What I, and everyone else, can im-
mediately do is get involved in the life of someone
you see heading in that direction so that the horren-
Continued on page 44
The

Literary
Freedom
Project e
is a not-for-profit arts
organization that supports
the literary arts through
education, creative thinking,
and new media. Towards this
goal, we publish Mosaic;
develop literature-based
lesson plans; and host the
Mosaic Literary Conference, an
annual literature-education
conference. li
te
ra
ry
fr
ee
do
m.
or
g

15
 MA AND I fought before I got pregnant; I left be-
cause I knew it would get much worse once she
found out. I never planned on getting pregnant when
I was fifteen; it just happened. But isn’t that just how
it always is? At least if you’re young and Black, or old
and Black for that matter. Planning pregnancy was
for White women; every woman I had ever known
just got caught—caught up in some man to the point
where she was foolish enough to drop a load for him,
believe all that “carry my seed I’m gonna love you
and my child” sweet talk. You can keep foolishness
and stupidity a secret, but a belly swelled will always
tell the truth even if it isn’t a whole one. The whole
truth is that the child was an even bigger accident
than the relationship. And a pregnant woman or
one who already has kids by a man who’s no longer
thinking about her never, ever tells that truth—not
even to herself.
I knew the story well. I had seen it, heard about it,
been warned about it; my own father left so I was
a victim of it. Any gathering of two or more women
made me a silent witness to the deep wounds men
left behind. Later I was guaranteed to be kept up
well into a night listening to my hardened mother,
still young, who vowed a crowbar couldn’t get her
stiff legs open again—let alone a man.
The story was always the same. At first he cooks her
breakfast in the mornings, rubs her feet at night,
pinches her cheeks like she’s his child herself, and
rubs her belly every time she walks by. He stands out-
side with his chest stuck out and brags to the neigh-
16 mosaicmagazine.org
borhood regulars that he “got a shorty coming.” He
buys her ice cream, comfortable walking shoes, and
a thick pink robe to sit on soft skin he rubs down
with the real baby lotion, after she takes the Calgon
bubble bath he ran. When he makes love to her, he’s
soft and careful. They lay tight like two spoons in a
squeaky bed, listening to Luther or the Isley Brothers
or Chaka Khan when she was still with Rufus, and
when she starts crying because she’s turned away
from him and she thinks he won’t know, he can tell
she’s scared he’ll leave her just from the tension stiff
in her back. So he massages her spine and her doubt,
wipes away her tears, and whispers, “Baby, I promise,
I ain’t going nowhere.”
He might mean it... until she swells so much from
both water and baby that she couldn’t pull her
grouchy lips in if she tried. Or until she has it and her
wrinkled, dark, sagging stomach won’t snap back to
that smoothness he used to love to bump up against.
I’ve seen them stay until the baby’s first blown-outof-
proportion birthday party or maybe even later, but
something about being called “Daddy”—never mind
husband—seems to choke men these days. They
shove off their women and kids like suffocating pil-
lows smashed against their faces, cutting off not only
their air and vision but the rest of their lives.
At least when somebody’s suffocating, you can tell:
you see their faces turn blue, their lips quiver, their
eyes buck, and their throats jerk. But when a man is
mentally packing his bags, the suitcase is never out
until he’s already standing on the other side of the
door. He suddenly gets shy whenever they have a
little time alone, silently fusses with the food on his
plate much more, if he’s even still eating her cooking
at all. Then his nights at the corner bar start drag-
ging on longer than they used to, well into the hours
they used to be shattering headboards and calling
each other’s names. Suddenly the mama he com-
plained about when they first got together becomes
strangely needy, and she starts hearing the excuse a
man gives a woman he wants to have sex with with-
out having to spend the night: “I gotta do something
for my mama.” Exactly what is never explained, but
she looks at him with puppy-dog eyes anyway and
says, “Okay, baby, take your time.” It’s all over by
the time she starts first dropping hints, then actu-
ally saying, “You need to start bringing some more
money into this house.” If the kids are lucky (and I
wasn’t), they’ll be too young to remember the argu-
ments filled in by the swish sound of flying objects,
the lightning-bolt crack of slammed doors, and of
course the face slaps. Finally the story ends when a
Greyhound bus or loaded-down car hits the high-
way, and the woman is left staring into a window
rather than out of it.
I know the exact moment my baby came inside me:
it was on October 11, 1992.
That was the night I met Rasul, and the night Renelle
Washington came home early from work with a new
surprise birthday cake for her husband Leroy. An
Entenmann’s German chocolate cake, thirty-six can-
dles standing up sharp and wicked like pitchforks.
The whole sixth-floor apartment still held on to the
burnt stink from Renelle’s earlier attempt at “home-
made” cooking.
Three months into another birth, she had tortured a
Duncan Hines chocolate box mix into volcanic rock
that morning; its nasty failure predicted the baby’s
fate.
Leroy and I whispered about the cake while he
lay on top of me on their black leather living-room
couch, finding his way, unprotected, into my silky
young softness for the second time that night. We
had been doing this behind his wife’s back for
months. He made my heart beat fast and my blood
race through my body so strong and hard my baby’s
heart started beating too. My baby screamed and
glowed red when it roared to life inside me, but
Leroy and I didn’t see or hear or know.
“Forget that burnt cake... this all the chocolate
I need right here,” Leroy whispered to me, and I
didn’t know how to respond. I was just fifteen then,
still spoke only when spoken to, tried not to curse in
front of grown folks or wear clothes that hugged my
shape too tight. I still wanted to be a child, but my
body just wasn’t having it. So I said nothing at all. I
just lay there in a slick mist of our sweat
Copyright © 2008 by Kalisha Buckhanon.
All rights reserved. 
17
18 mosaicmagazine.org

Slumberland
By Paul Beatty
Bloomsbury
Review by D. Scot Miller
Though he was one of the first stand-out stars of the
Nuyorican scene before the term “poetry slam” was
a part of the zeitgeist; and his work has been pub-
lished consistently, though discretely, for the past
twenty-plus years; and his first book of poems, Big
Bank Take Little Bank, simultaneously grabbed the
attentions of Allen Ginsberg and Ice Cube, is there a
black male American writer more slept on than Paul
Beatty? The author of three books of fiction, two of
poetry, and one anthology gets so little mention in
the annals of contemporary literature.
His latest novel, Slumberland, which has gained lit-
tle notice as it has oozed its way into the collective
unconsciousness, may give some clues to how the
author has managed to walk the tightrope between
blowing up and going pop, and have fun doing it.
DJ Darky is a sub-genius sommelier for a jukebox
in a West Berlin Bar, Slumberland, a hot spot for
miscegenation between buxom German frauliens
Reviews
and black expats shortly before the fall of the Wall.
He comes seeking his hero and potential co-signer
to his perfect beat; an avant-garde jazz musician
known as “The Schwa.”
Within the first twenty pages, through Darky, Be-
atty calls almost all black male actors over the last
two decades Uncle Toms, proclaims the death of
hip-hop, and declares black people passé and obso-
lete. Somehow, these polemics do not come across
as a pop culture hodge-podge, but the backstory
about one man’s search for perfection, love, and
acceptance. And this is where we get our first clue
towards Beatty’s warm receptions as a writer and
scholar. For over twenty years, many black Ameri-
can writers have been feeding sacred cows and
bringing long-festering wounds to light. What has
been woefully missing in the dialogue of black let-
ters is the power of satire. Beatty’s 2005 anthology,
Hokum, shows him to be a studied master of black
humor and radical imagination and Slumberland is
laugh-out-loud funny. There are passages here that
make me blurt out, like some people laugh at jazz
concerts when an impresario pulls out an amazing
aural stunt. I’m constantly impressed with this writer
who’s not afraid to say NIGGER in all caps.
19
 As the Berlin Wall falls, and secret agents and rag-
men emerge, Beatty remains pitch perfect in his
critique of black/white America, Germany, and
western civilization to date. So much so, that acer-
bic insight becomes commonplace and the “been
there, done that” uber-hip-ness exuded by Darky
and his growing cadre never comes off as smarmy
or condescending. It’s this lack of self-seriousness
that causes many readers to miss the serious intent
of Beatty’s work. Since his first novel, White Boy
Shuffle, there has been an apocalyptic foreboding,
a sinister grin, a lonely ache for connection and vali-
dation that has permeated his work. There is a ten-
sion in Slumberland that recalls the monologues of
Richard Pryor in his heyday; where folly and despair
collide with race consciousness and self-destructive
impulse, causing us to relate to frailties so deeply
that only laughter makes sense.
This is a fun book with more truth than most Ameri-
cans can bear, though, like his previous novel,
Tuff, Beatty can get lost in atmospheric description
that distracts rather than emphasizes his scenes. In
Slumberland, the description of the bar itself and
the various characters who frequent it can serve as
foils and the urge to skim becomes greatest during
these passages. But it’s a small price to pay for the
overall impact of Beatty’s wit, emotion, and keen
observation of human behavior in all of its fragility
and pathos.
20 mosaicmagazine.org
There is a confirmation in not only Slumberland, but
Beatty’s entire body of work that, no, you’re not
crazy. There are folks out here who see the same
absurd shit you do.
Gomer’s Song
By Kwame Dawes
Akashic Books
Review by Adisa Vera Beatty
In his fifteenth poetry collection, Gomer’s Song,
Kwame Dawes comes up on the reader like an insis-
tent scent, haint, or force of nature. Giving voice to
Gomer, the saved harlot wife God told the prophet
Hosea to marry, we are taken on a sojourn of desire,
forgiveness, and freedom with a woman unlikely to
be forgotten. In the span of forty-four poems Dawes
simultaneously resurrects and creates a mythic
woman with such poignancy that you never doubt
her existence. And so with lines like, “I was born for
this story” Dawes anoints the reader a believer.
Told in three sections, Gomer’s Song begins with the
widely accepted and comfortable knowledge about
Gomer; she was a loose and unrepentant woman.
What we are not comfortable with is all that Dawes
brings us with Gomer’s Song; the difficulty of need,
the price of freedom. In the poem Repentance
Gomer contemplates the well-traveled path she’s
allowed her desire to blaze:

Then the blood begins to return
to stiffened limbs, and the room grows,
curry yellow before the brown
of regret. In this hiatus, I am clean
as a confessor, able again to rebuild
that new fiction of redemption.
And sated like this, it is easy
o say this will be the last
faceless man’s basic desire,
the last pathetic stranger
to seep into me; that tomorrow
a new woman will begin
to rebuild the wreckage of her life.
But helpless and victim are two things this Gomer is
not. Dawes plots out the complex geography of his
Gomer who is at times an audacious and haughty
conjurer who uses her sexuality like she’s working
a root. Then at other times she reveals what is be-
neath her surface; that no one knows her or her true
story. Gomer was given the title of wife and mother,
was shown mercy, but only she can give herself sal-
vation. We stumble with Gomer like all sinners do
as she shrugs the place she has been assigned from
her body like an unwanted garment.
By section two there is the acknowledgement of
damage, shame, and the relief that comes with
receiving mercy. In poems like “Certified,” “Hus-
band,” “Times Seven” and “The Wounds I Have
Made” Gomer not only confesses to seeking some-
thing outside herself, but also has difficulty accept-
ing that she is worthy of forgiveness in spite of her
failings. “Times Seven” alludes to the Bible and
God’s command that you should forgive times sev-
en. And it is forgiveness that this Gomer rails against
and leans into.
TIMES SEVEN
The woman coming through the trees,
the speckled light of dusk
on her skin, is your love
returning again to be forgiven
with tears in her face;
embrace the broken woman.
When we leave Gomer she continues to lin-
ger with us like the memory of her past deeds
remains with her. In the poem “Punishment”
we see that Gomer cares deeply for what she
once devalued; her husband, children, herself.
“Still I battle my appetite with fasts and carry the
weight of guilt on me. But this is not freedom, not
the birthright of bloodshed and broken flesh. I re-
ceive the bargain of ages and turn to face my fragile
21
 collateral: the husband, the children, these words,
still intact, still within my reach--against this debt I
cannot repay.”
Gomer’s Song is a lyric of love, self-love, and the
give and take of forgiveness and liberation.
Conduit: Poems
By Khadijah Queen
Akashic Books
Review by Athena Dixon
Claudia Rankine writes in her introduction to Khad-
ijah Queen’s debut collection, “Hers is a poetic sen-
sibility that denies the poems transcendence and
conclusion.” Throughout Conduit, Queen weaves
between the concrete and the air. Readers know
there is solid ground beneath their feet, but also
know there is something to reach for above their
heads. It is through her poetry that she guides the
audience between what they’ve known and what
they’ll learn. When readers come across an image
to grasp onto, the poems ballast them below the
surface and beyond. However, those handles are
not to be relied upon. Instead, readers are pulled to
focus on the shadowy, the less than clear aspects of
the collection and expand rather than remain stag-
nant. These poems are both opaque and sparse in
their construction, and it serves the collection well.
22 mosaicmagazine.org
The strength of Conduit is its use of language and
form. When Khadijah Queen writes in “Return via
Two Renaissances to a Distinct Unmasking,” “You
love the idea of voice as an instrument, that two/Is
not two, but dissonance” you have been invited into
the heart of the collection. The voice of these po-
ems is certainly an instrument, but the melody isn’t
always sweet. She creates pitches that keep readers
off kilter, harmonies from themes that readers may
not have considered alongside tones that are freshly
new. This is a skittish new jazz full of possibilities.
With ample white space and succinct word choice,
there is more than enough room for each poem
to flower to its full potential. There is no crowding
on the page to distract from the craftsmanship of
the collection. It is quite clear the poet knows that
space is at a premium and she uses it wisely.
In its weaker moments Conduit relies too heavily
on the aforementioned shadows. Yes, the poems’
turns remain sharp and interesting, but there is a
softness missing in the collection as a whole. This is
not to say the poems should be diluted, but at times
the reader yearns for the melodies to mesh, for the
dissonance to be quieted for a moment. Lush lines
such as “I have counted the thousand thirsty buds/
burrowed in the black/bulk of your loosened/hair”
from “Four Suggestions” or, “Poised for the stir-
ring of small miracles” in “Suspension Tactics” are
the rounded corners the collection needs more of.
This addition would highlight the crispness that is
the hallmark of Conduit while allowing additional
entries into the poems. Without them, some read-
ers may feel like they are on the outside looking
in, knowing there is something wonderful to be had
but unable to wrap their minds around it.
This is a weakness in the collection, but again the
possibilities of these hard-edged poems lie within
the same breath. “The Ofrendas Rojas” section of
the collection is the softness sought. Here the care-
ful construction is layered with quietness. Balanced
between the starker sections “Distance as the Root
of Olive Trees” and “Suspension Tactics,” “Ofren-
das Rojas” is more accessible, more concrete. The
opening poem “La Katrina” is what the book’s best
is comprised of. It is appropriately complex while
remaining open enough for a cross section of read-
ers to enjoy. This is where readers are firmly planted
on the ground while still searching what resides
above.
Queen writes, “Art is a leap through time.” At the
end the questions form. Where will these poems
leave us? Will we be moved forward? Most certain-
ly. By the conclusion of Conduit, readers are now
with the poet between the concrete and the air. As
Khadijah Queen pens, these pages are truly “wide
and vibrating.”
Kinky Gazpacho
By Lori L. Tharps
Atria
Review by Jada Bradley
Many people ignore or forget childhood longings
that call them to do or be something other than
what they are. Lori L. Tharps is not one of those
people. She followed through on her childhood
attraction to the country of Spain and takes read-
ers through her inner and outer journeys to make
peace with her place in the world. Tharps, a writer
and editor whose work has appeared in publica-
tions like Essence and Glamour, goes from someone
who tries in vain to keep her color “under wraps”
to a woman on a mission to get to the root of the
African presence in Spain.
Although the book has been placed in the travel
category, it is not strictly a travel diary. Tharps does
not begin with her first journey to Spain. Instead,
she sets the stage with her childhood interest in for-
eign cultures. In high school she visits Morocco and
has a brief romance with a Spanish exchange stu-
dent—events that will foreshadow her experiences
in Spain.
Growing up in Wisconsin, Tharps alternately strug-
gles with and is at peace with what it is to be one
of the few black children in a mostly white environ-
ment. Readers with similar backgrounds will relate
23
 to her dismay at feeling she has no culture to display
at her school’s cultural day, or her mortification at
classmates’ brushing aside of a game called “nigger
pile-on.” These themes continue during Tharps’s
time in Spain where her attempts to dress like a
Spaniard don’t allow her to blend in and she must
endure racially charged taunts from children in her
host family’s neighborhood.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is Tharps’s en-
gaging voice. It is hard not to root for her as she
struggles to make sense of what it means to be black
in and out of America. In our rather confessional
age, her candor is authentic and not vain. She does
a good job of inviting readers in, although occasion-
ally she does forget to clarify things when a reader
would need to know. There is an entire chapter
called “Sally,” and Tharps waits until the following
chapter to explain that Sally is her nickname for
Salamanca.
While at the University of Salamanca, Tharps devel-
ops a crush on a student in her German class. With
the help of friends, she is able to meet Manuel,
a Spanish classmate, who is an NBA fanatic. This
Spaniard who will eventually become her husband
had childhood dreams of America and of marrying
a black woman. Their union inspired the book’s
title—the author represented by “kinky” and her
husband by “gazpacho.”
24 mosaicmagazine.org
Marrying into a Spanish family means Tharps will
continue to visit Spain and grapple with the ways in
which Spain’s overt and subtle racism pours salt on
the unhealed wounds she bears as an African Amer-
ican. Though Manuel is open-minded and willing
to enter into discussions about race and prejudice,
his family is not always so interested. Nevertheless,
with a few exceptions, the family accepts Tharps
into the fold.
Attitudes about people of African descent are con-
tradictory all over the world, and the mix of fasci-
nation and prejudice combined with the denial of
racism in Spanish-speaking countries can be mysti-
fying. Starting in Cádiz, Tharps decides to take on
the challenge of clearing up some of Spain’s ambi-
guity about its slaveholding past. She doesn’t do this
to prove anyone right or wrong, but for her own
personal edification. The book, which up until this
point has been a delightful memoir, takes a turn into
more journalistic territory. This is still Tharps’s jour-
ney, but the storytelling changes, and the book loses
some of its entertaining qualities.
Even in unearthing some historical truths, Tharps
finds mixed messages. She hears that slavery in
Spain was not all that bad, that it was just domes-
tic servitude and that blacks in Spain were not uni-
versally despised. At the same time she learns that
when they arrived in Cádiz, slaves received a brand
on their cheeks with a symbol that represented the
Spanish word for slave.
Despite the unpleasantness of slavery, Tharps finds
that her investigation into Spain’s past helps her be-
cause it points to an overlooked African presence
in the culture she was drawn to and joined by mar-
riage. In the end, Tharps finds that although Spain
doesn’t always embrace her, it is up to her to em-
brace Spain.
Gentleman Jigger, A Novel of the Harlem Renaissance
By Richard Bruce Nugent
Da Capo
Review by J. A. Barnes
Richard Bruce Nugent, one of the young artists of the
Harlem Renaissance, never completed the roman à
clef he began in 1928. When he died in 1987, he
left several drafts, and from these, editor Thomas
Wirth constructed Gentleman Jigger, A Novel of the
Harlem Renaissance. It is risky business to cobble
together a writer’s unfinished manuscript to create
the novel the author intended. In the effort to “re-
main faithful to Nugent’s intent and…style,” Wirth
admits, “[c]opyediting was kept to a minimum.” The
result is less than satisfactory as literary art. Loosely
structured, disjointed, verbose, and ultimately un-
satisfying, Gentleman Jigger is still a valuable con-
tribution to the literature of the Renaissance for its
insider’s look into issues of race, color, class, and,
especially, sexuality among the various constituents
of Jazz Age New York.
Nugent does little to disguise his alter ego in the
novel, Jerome Stuartt Brennan, a “vagabond poet”
who comes to New York from Washington and
lands within the inner circle of the young lights like
Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee
Cullen, and Wallace Thurman. As an inhabitant of
“Niggeratti Manor,” who reportedly had an excel-
lent recall of people and events, Nugent recants the
daily doings of the talented and well-connected, the
inhabitants of Harlem and the downtown whites
who found Negroes so fascinating. In a sometimes
disjointed narrative and wordy passages of exposi-
tion, the novel follows the young, light-complex-
ioned homosexual Stuartt from Harlem to Green-
wich Village to Chicago and back to New York as
he challenges the conventions of race and sexuality
at a time when revelations of homosexual relation-
ships would have been groundbreaking and shock-
ing. Nugent was the first African-American man to
write openly about being gay, in his prose poem
for the magazine Fire!!, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade.”
Gentleman Jigger, says Arnold Rampersad, “radi-
cally alter[s] the landscape of Harlem Renaissance
literature…mak[ing] it impossible to evade or sup-
press the central role of gay writers in this cultural
period.”
Continued on page 39
25
26 mosaicmagazine.org
 the
Darker
Mask
Allegory for a
New Literature
by Christopher Chambers
Our hero saga begins in a comic book shop, in a south-
ern metropolis which, yes, we’ll call “Metropolis” in the
state of “Y’all.” And the shop’s not some innocuous strip
mall storefront manned by aging hippies or meth-addled
teenagers. It’s gleaming, glitzy, glorious. Stocked with all
of the titles and toys and Xbox/PlayStation/Wii games
which Hollywood has now kidnapped and blasted into
the American consumer’s psyche. Indeed, many of its
patrons are grown children who captain some the big-
gest companies in Metropolis. They, in turn, bring their
small children, on whom they lavish expensive action
figures and the newest, bloodiest or most life-like com-
puter games…

In walks Cristobal, Stevie, and Sujata. Cristobal is 28,

Stevie and Sujata are eight and fraternal twins. They’re
the kids of Cristobal’s girlfriend. None are imbued with
obvious superhero powers other than curiosity and
imagination. Their usual bonding exercise is to browse

27
 the latest comics, graphic novels, adventure books,
sci-fi collections…and of course the toy collectibles
to fire the blood of all true fanboys and girls. Cris-
tobal is Latino, the twins are African American.
Cristobal asks the shop clerk—a freckle-faced dude
wearing a tall-tee “wifebeater” and baggie denims
pretty much matching Cristobal’s own—which
books and comic books feature Hispanic heroes,
black heroes. And not necessarily costumed crusad-
ers who shoot Lord-knows from their fingertips, or
can fly or breathe underwater or summon the pow-
er of heaven (or hell). Regular folk. Folk the captains
of Metropolis, Y’all, regularly ignore…
The shop clerk eyes the pair. He’s seen them before
and they drop a lot of coin in the shop, yet each
time he thinks they’re only indoors to escape the
sun and muggy air, or use the restroom. He shrugs
his shoulders at Cristobal’s query. He’s not racist.
The black guys he hangs with at school love him
for he “talk like them;” he skateboards with two
Mexican dudes in the convenience store parking
lot every Sunday afternoon when it’s warm out. Of
course he dryly recites the usual fare: old “Blade”
stories, Marvel’s new “Black Panther-Storm” wed-
ding arc—but he asserts a couple of white custom-
ers consider it too “soap opera” or even reverse-rac-
ist! The Green Lantern is black in some issues…oh,
and there’s a “Spawn” collectible…and as for prose
books, well, he’s never heard of the late Octavia
28 mosaicmagazine.org
Butler, Steve Barnes, and a host of other writers of
adventure, suspense, sci-fi, even history, mythol-
ogy: black, Hispanic, Asian—female. Kyle Baker’s
graphic novel Nat Turner? Nope. Phillipe Smith, the
young brother who writes and illustrates Japanese
manga? Sure, there’re goo-gobs of manga titles—G
rated and adult—splashed all over the aisles. Unh-
unh, never heard of him. Dwayne McDuffie…sure-
ly you know him? Even Stevie chirps that McDuffie
works on his favorite TV cartoon, Ben 10.
“Huh? Who’s Dwayne McDuffie?”
Stevie squints at the clerk, puffs out a lip. Sujata tugs
on the hem of Cristobal’s tall-tee. But rather than
sigh in dejection, she muses, “Okay, then we’ll have
...
to tell our own stories.” And her brother chimes in,
“Good ones that everyone will like.”
In 2006, I passed this anecdote (the names and
location are above changed to protect the not-so-
innocent) onto crime author and L.A. legend Gary
Phillips. He was visiting the East Coast for a con-
ference and I drove up to Baltimore from D.C. for
several beers. Two writers talking shop. We’d al-
ready bandied about ideas for something like The
Darker Mask over email. Less comic book or graphic
novel, more a homage to the pulp fiction and ad-
venture stories which birthed the characters, plots,
and themes in modern four-color comics. But we
needed a tipping point.
For me it was the exchange at the glittering comic
shop. Like the saloon in the 19th century and Star-
bucks in the late 20th, comic shops are now the cool
place to hang. And if they sell/rent computer games,
they’re even more plugged into a multi-billion dol-
lar multi-media entertainment enterprise. One in
which people of color are increasingly making their
presence known. Unfortunately, whether readers or
creators, we fight the same superhero battles against
the evil forces of commercialism that we do in films,
music, TV, and in the traditional publishing realm:
too few of us as gatekeepers and editors, too many
others pushing stereotypes and fluff. Or there’s the
old bromide—too often passed by publishers and
authors of more conventional African-American fic-
tion—that people of color won’t accept adventure
stories, or “literary” graphic novels.
I knew Gary was already ensconced in the graphic
novel version of Angeltown, featuring his hard-
boiled black detective Ivan Monk. Like him, I grew
up on pulp fiction, on old tales of adventure like
James Fennimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, to
the contemporary collections like New York Times
bestselling author Michael Chabon’s McSweeney’s
Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, featuring Ai-
mee Bender, Neil Gaiman, and of course Stephen
King. In them I even see the digital/virtual derring-
do of the game HALO’s Master Chief. Master Chief
is a brother, if you didn’t already know. Concurrent-
ly, a few traditional authors were beginning a foray
into the comics medium, as with Hurston-Wright
Award winner Mat Johnson’s scripting of Papa Mid-
nite: Djimon Honsou’s character in the film Con-
stantine, from the Hellblazer comics series. Mat was
also noodling over what would become the criti-
L.A. Banks, Mat Johnson, and Gary Phillips
cally acclaimed 2007 graphic novel about lynching
in the 1930s American south, Incognegro. I was ru-
minating over how to serialize the stories of unsung
heroes and real people into sequential art (the tech-
nical term for comics and graphic novels; “prose”
is the catch-all for just book print), a la the 9-11
Commission and Malcolm X, in which Coretta Scott
King Award-winning artist Randy DeBurke breathed
vivid life. Of course there was Kyle’s seminal Nat
Turner, as a model, and groundbreaking horror col-
lections like Brandon Massey’s Dark Dreams series
with stories by such diverse authors as Zane or Eric
29
 Jerome Dickey.
Gary and I decided to marry sequential art with
printed fiction the way it was done old school: prose,
with illustrations. Yet we still lacked a spiritual cen-
ter. That element came in the voice of Walter Mos-
ley. It was he who said we needed this Darker Mask.
We, as in all readers, particularly folks of color. Not
writers. Readers. Stories for regular people, about
regular people. Ignored, abused, reviled, forgotten
people. Not even the cheerleaders or comfortable
suburban housewives you see on ABC’s Heroes.
In Walter’s universe, these “new” superheroes
where not copies of white, male counterparts fea-
turing some contrived character flaw. The women
were not to be clones of large-breasted white
glama-zon zombie killers: the rubric of adolescent
male imaginations. We wanted nuance, edge. And
reality. From that creed—an ingredient spicing the
work of most writers and artists of color—we crafted
our thesis for The Darker Mask. As Gary expounds,
“My job is to try to bring some verisimilitude to the
page and present a story that the reader will take
away something of value; that they didn’t blow their
[money] on ya-ya.”
Mindful not to offer ya-ya, we went about recruiting
our own legion of super heroines and heroes: Sleep-
ers author Lorenzo Carcaterra, who’s also scribed
gritty dialogue for bestselling computer games (and
30 mosaicmagazine.org
who hasn’t seen the movie version with Pitt, De-
Niro, and Hoffman?). Bestselling and Edgar Award-
winning author Naomi Hirahara. Peter Spiegelman.
Private eye master Reed Farrel Coleman. Suspense
bestseller Alexandra Sokoloff. Women-in-comics
pioneer Annie Nocenti (creator of Dare-Devil). Ta-
nanarive Due and Steven Barnes, fresh with their
collaboration with Blair Underwood. Vibe, The
Source and XXL journalist Mike Gonzales. Gary’s
L.A. partner in crime Gar Anthony Haywood. Ad-
venture-fable writer Wayne Wilson. Comic book
author Doselle Young. Literary award winners Mat
Johnson and Victor LaValle. Bestseller and book
club favorite Leslie “LA” Banks. Walter Mosley, the
mentor. And the late Jerry Rodriguez—playwright,
filmmaker, scion of all things Nuyorican, Bronx, and
Brooklyn and cool, already famed from a three-
book deal with Kensington before his death from
cancer. The artists are not to be messed with either:
Shawn Martinbrough of Marvel, DC/Vertigo, and
the author of How to Draw Noir Comics. Stars like
Brian Hurtt and Sean Wang. Legendary magazine
illustrator and painter Jeff Fisher.
Nevertheless, the advice from marketing mavens was
and is to invite rappers or perhaps even video vix-
ens to pen these prose stories or comics. Politely, we
demurred. True, many rappers, including Method
Man, are contemplating their own comics lines and
they look damn good; hip-hop is a perfect compli-
ment to the sequential art form. Yet recently at the
phenomenon known as Comic Con in San Diego,
even Method Man decried the silly, watered-down
commercialization of his art. So while we didn’t
approach rappers for The Darker Mask (maybe we
will—stay tuned), we do have a story by hip-hop
journalist Mike Gonzales, “The Whores of Onyx
City,” illustrated by Sean Wang. And in this and oth-
er contributions you see our themes in action. “I’ve
been drawn (pun intended) to comic books since I
was a kid growing up in Harlem,” Gonzales relates.
“I can remember going to a newsstand around the
way every week and falling in love with the four-
color fantasies that depicted my favorite heroes Bat-
man, Daredevil, and the Hulk.” Some of Gonzales’
first fiction purchases weren’t just Chester Himes,
or even Donald Goines or Langston Hughes’ po-
etry, but horror books like House of Mystery, House
of Secrets and Creepy. Indeed, Gonzales credits
influences such as “blaxploitation actresses, new
wave flicks, Wu-Tang albums, the fiction of Ches-
ter Himes, David Goodis, and Paul Auster, as well
as the crazy crack heads that populated my hood
for over a decade” as inspirations for his story, and
Wang faithfully interprets the flow in his artwork.
Speaking of urban artistry and flow, there’s PEN/
Faulkner finalist Victor LaValle’s character Tony
Flow, who, as a young black man in Brooklyn, has
got no memories of his childhood, “but [has] some
spectacular powers and in this story he finally learns
to embrace the more heroic aspects of himself.
Which bodes well for the world, I guess.” And for
young potential heroes and heroines like our Stevie
and Sujata…
LA Banks is already a veteran of the phantasmagori-
cal with her wildly successful Vampire Huntress nov-
els from St. Martin’s Press. African-American females
supposedly are cold to horror/fantasy, to sci-fi, and
adventure. Strange monsters and myths. Though
Banks also counts herself as a romance writer, she’s
gleefully smashed that particular myth about black
women’s reading habits to atoms. Indeed Profes-
sor Jennifer Ryan asserts that adventure prose and
graphic novels present an “important literary forum
for black women’s voices.” Thus for Banks, it’s al-
ways a pleasure for her to attend the Hollywood-
driven and supposedly white male geek-dominated
Comic Con. “It was a total sensory overload of all
things sci-fi, paranormal, and fun!” she gushes.
“It’s like one of those things you can’t believe or
fathom until you see it—sort of a human version of
the running of the bulls.” Banks opines, “People like
to read about others that have overcome vast chal-
lenges and dramas because that’s what they identify
with. What about tension and struggle... what is he-
roic about being completely invincible? You might
as well be God and then there’s no issue, right? Not
interesting at all.” That’s why she works so hard to
create a body of work for the grown-up versions of
little Sujata.
Continued on page 38
31
 Healing Words\\
an Interview with
Opal Palmer Adisa
by D. Scot Miller

Dr. Opal Palmer Adisa is a literary critic,

renowned storyteller, author of thirteen
books, and tenured professor at the Cal-
ifornia College of the Arts. She also does
workshops on writing, using literature to
examine sexism, racism, and homopho-
bia.

Born in Jamaica, Professor Adisa con-

nects with the griot tradition to involve
audiences, and her book of poetry,
Tamarind and Mango Women, won the

32 mosaicmagazine.org
33
 1992 American Book Award. Her novel, It Begins
with Tears, was recommended in Great Books for
High School Kids: A Teacher’s Guide to Books that
Can Change Teens Lives. As a mother of three and
former artistic director of Watoto Wa Kuumba, an
Oakland children’s theater group, she has spoken
and taught on issues of parenting, going as far as to
host a regular show on the topic at Pacifica Radio
station KPFA.
With a first-hand understanding of the Caribbean
storytelling tradition, Dr. Opal Palmer Adisa has
brought tales, songs, and musings from Africa and
the African-American experience to Oakland and
the world for over thirty years. We were fortunate
to catch the busy and influential writer/mystic for
a phone interview. Even over the phone, Dr. Adisa
weaves personal narratives that traverse time, space,
and experience with a rare candor.
D. Scot Miller: When did you come into the griot
tradition?
Opal Palmer Adisa: My tradition developed from
my grandfather, my grand aunt, and growing up
around people who told stories.
My maternal grandfather was a storyteller, not
an official storyteller, but he would tell us stories.
My mother used to send our sister and me out
to the country for about two or three weeks and
34 mosaicmagazine.org
my maternal great aunt, who died four years ago
at 102, was a consummate story teller. Jamaica
gained its independence in 1962. We didn’t get
TV until 1962. And it would come on in the eve-
ning and go off at midnight. What Jamaicans did
at that time, what most people in the world did
before TV, they would tell stories. Even after TV
came out, we would sit down and tell stories. At
that time, the most popular kind of stories were
duppy or ghost stories. She would tell us stories
and I was so afraid I wouldn’t want to sleep by my-
self. I didn’t want to go to the bathroom by myself!
I came to the states a little before I was sixteen.
My brother had graduated from high school and
moved to New York to be a journalist. I left Kings-
ton and did my last year-and-a-half in New York
and attended Hunter College. When I was there,
I had a wonderful teacher who had storytelling
classes on Saturday where we would work with
children telling familiar stories and changing the
ending. It occurred to me that I had duppy sto-
ries and Anansi stories that were not being told.
I went back to Jamaica in 1975 and worked there as
an education officer and TV producer for children’s
shows until August ’79. I wanted a masters in cre-
ative writing because I was writing and being pub-
lished regularly between ’76 and ’79. I was looking
for the poets and there was Kammau Brathwaite
and Mervyn Morris. I contacted them, showed
BREAKING POINT I

the knife slips

severing the finger
which hangs
attached by a willowy muscle

the day’s stress

snaps the mind
which clings
to any thread of meaning

the wound
with its vulgar blood
draws loud sympathy

the mind struggling

for meaning
is greeted with indignation

35
 them my work, and established a relationship. Kam-
mau Brathwaite was my mentor. He published me
in his magazine, Clavicle, and got me published in
the states in Nimrod when they had a special Carib-
bean issue.
DSM: Is this where you first got involved with
radio?
OPA: I had one of the first poetry radio shows in
Jamaica in the ’70s, and when I went back, I had a
call-in show for teachers.
Though my degree in education media focused on
television, radio is still exciting in the Caribbean. In
rural areas, a radio show is the best way to com-
municate. There are so many talk shows that people
listen to and call.
DSM: How do you feel about Oakland right
now?
OPM: The Bay Area has been wonderful to me. I
lived in San Francisco for a year and through a guy I
was seeing, I came to Oakland. I could not imagine
living anywhere else.It’s nurtured my creativity. The
temperament of Oakland just felt right for me.
I entered my masters as a poet. I started out as a
storyteller in the griot tradition. While I was wait-
ing to get in at San Francisco State I took a class at
36 mosaicmagazine.org
City College with Lesley Simon who taught a poetry
class. She asked me, “What are you doing here?
You’re not at the level of these students.”
She told me about Poetry for the People and asked
me to become a member and teach the class. She
recommended me. I was the only black in the pro-
gram at that time, there were a lot of North Beach
poets. This is where I met Jack Hirschmen. Each of
us produced chapbooks of our work at the end of
the semester. John Kerr asked me to get my best po-
ems together and he showed me how to do it. They
published my first chapbook, “Market Woman.” It
gave me my entrée in to the poetry scene in Cali-
fornia.
I took a short story class at State and realized there
were these stories from Jamaica I wanted to tell.
Stories I had from Jamaica that were not being re-
flected, and it was from that class that my first book
of short stories went on to get published. All of the
stories I started in that class got published in that
first collection, Big Face and Other Guava Stories. It
was the first Chelsea Street book to be reviewed in
the New York Times and ended up being taught in
schools in South Africa, England, and Italy. And that
really surprised me. I’m always surprised because
I look at the stories and am surprised that I wrote
them. I’m amazed how long the stories have lived.
It’s four stories about four rural Jamaican women.
Continued on page 47
BREAKING POINT VI

the slightest comment

causes my eyes
to smart
i pretend the wind
has blown something
my way

i fix on an idea
search through my jig-saw mind

if i can find words

with which to test the idea
if words don’t abandon me
as many have
i know i will be fine

it will be rough going

but i’ll make it through

as long as i have words

words which repel
those waiting to pounce on me
i can find my way
back to the beginning
where this unraveling began

words
my true only friends

37
 Author Mat Johnson, who burst upon the tradi-
tional prose universe with the acclaimed novels
Drop and Hunting in Harlem, expands this notion of
hero as ordinary brotherman with Henchman, also
illustrated by Sean Wang. Ain’t it Cool News fetes
Henchman as one of the more creative works in
The Darker Mask, yet for Johnson, the story’s gen-
esis is fairly simple. “In a lot of stories of this genre,
you always see these endless hordes of henchman
and they’re anonymous, their lives are expendable
and they have no stories, so I also wondered what
they were about. I figured, in today’s economy, they
would have to be temps, no more loyal to the com-
pany than your local Wal-Mart clerk. Also, my story
is a riff on Batman, and what I find interesting about
that character is the class dynamic he brings: here
is this billionaire who wants for nothing beating the
hell out of guys whose lives have been distorted by
poverty, who are just trying to get by and have a bet-
ter life. Morally, it’s actually really troubling. In that
sense, the Joker is actually the hero: the performance
artist who sees through the rich guy’s self righteous
big-game-hunting bullshit and exposes his absurdity
to the world.”
We couldn’t agree more.
Do you have to be black or Latina or Latino or from
India or a woman to offer such tales to fans and new-
comers? Not necessarily. James Patterson and Jeffrey
Deaver invented Alex Cross and Lincoln Rhyme;
Frank Miller of 300, Sin City, and Batman: The Dark
Knight Returns gives us the justice-doing young sis-
ter Martha Washington. The creator of cult-favorite
manga hero Afro Samurai (now a cartoon voiced by
Samuel L. Jackson) is Japanese. Yet we can’t entirely
rely on others to tell and produce or publish our sto-
ries.
38 mosaicmagazine.org
At the very least we can expect this new universe,
these better stories, to be in full bloom by the
time Cristobal’s charges, Stevie and Sujata, are old
enough to buy and read many titles on their own.
And Cristobal will see and read about people who
look like him, struggle as he does, and not through
the eyes of someone who can only guess how Cris-
tobal feels. So here’s a hint of what’s to come in
heroic literature by people of color.
While I lay up in my sickbed this past July, Gary
Phillips and Doselle Young sat on a panel at Com-
ic Con echoing these very themes of gritty reality,
of ageless stories. To everyone’s surprise but not
shock, the crowd was huge and diverse and wanted
more. Our panel in turn complemented another
panel, this one perhaps more hyped and glamor-
ous, moderated by Michael Davis. This dais’s guests
included Method Man himself, Dwayne McDuffie,
actor-filmmaker Rusty Cundieff (Sprung, Tales from
the Hood, Fear of a Black Planet), John Dokes from
Marvel. BET’s Denys Cowan and entertainment chief
Reginald Hudlin. Poet Faith Cheltenham gave The
Darker Mask a shout-out, true, but the focus quickly
shifted to future, not a grim past or uneasy present.
There were comments like “leave hopeful,” and that
these stories—whether literature, sequential art, film,
and TV are meaningful for everyone—and not mere-
ly for a “niche market” of black folks.
We all need them, such stories. Probably more than
ever. Almost every book or graphic novel or comic
or clip reviewed in Rich Watson’s blog Glyphs on
Popcultureshock.com, or studied by academics such
as Jennifer Ryan and Professor William Fuller, II are
about struggle and aspiration. These are the elements
that make even superbeings human, as LA Banks
says. Moreover, independent publishers are pump-
ing out titles like Stagger Lee, or Southside Nefertiti,
or Harlem Spider. We can expect more literary titles
like Mat Johnson’s Incognegro.
Gary will offer the street parable High Rollers
through Boom!Studios. Artist Shawn Martinbrough,
former DC editor Joe Illidge, and I already have joint
sequential art projects ready to launch through both
traditional prose and comics publishers, including
the 1930s true-life Harlem crime story, Gangster-
land. Like our heroes little Stevie and Sujata said:
our own tales. Better ones. Not just for fantasy junk-
ies or comic/gamer fanboys and girls. For us all.
That’s why we donned The Darker Mask. 
Reviews
The novel reveals little more about the Renaissance
that readers of Hughes, Hurston, and Thurman don’t
know already. Considered a satire in the same vein
as Thurman’s Infants of the Spring, it is not as biting
as that work. Readers get little of the sense of the
jazz in this Jazz Age novel. While the characters fre-
quent the uptown nightspots, we learn more about
their drink orders than we do about the entertain-
ment. Neither are the characters well formed. Rusty
(Thurman) lives with Stuartt and appears frequent-
ly in the first part of the book, but Tony (Hughes)
and Nona (Hurston) drift in and out of the story,
their characters remaining flat and static. Nor does
Gentleman Jigger clear up any questions about the
sexuality of these fellow writers, particularly about
Hughes. The focus is on Stuartt, the Gentleman Jig-
ger (a very light Negro who could pass for white).
Stuartt shares an apartment and a bed with Rusty,
but it’s not at all clear that the relationship is physi-
cal. The novel is more frank when recounting Stu-
artt’s sexual involvements with Italian gangsters in
New York and Chicago. The intelligent, lively poet
and artist charms his way into bed with dangerous
men who outwardly profess scorn toward “queers.”
Stuartt manages to stay alive and unhurt even when
he upsets his lover Orini, said by Nugent to be
based on Lucky Luciano.
Stuartt provides Orini his first experience of gay
sex. Afterwards, Stuartt tells him, “You’re one of the
handsomest people I’ve ever seen, and your hair is
lovely. But you’re still Orini to me,” and the Chicago
gangster in anger says, “You lousy little punk.” Stu-
artt’s intelligence, quick wit, and moxy soothe Ori-
ni’s temper and later allow even Stuartt’s discarded
gangster lovers to remain friendly. These qualities
in Stuartt provide the most engaging aspects of the
novel. Through little effort of his own, Stuartt be-
comes a successful artist and wins his place in the
pantheon of Renaissance artists. Equally as effort-
lessly, he emerges as an intriguing character, espe-
cially as he provides a look into the life of Nugent
himself, one of the lesser-known Negro artists from
the period.
Although it is a novel in need of editing, Gentle-
man Jigger provides readers with a new experience
of and a new voice from the Harlem Renaissance,
and is therefore a valuable resource and an interest-
ing read. >>>
39
 Say You’re One Of Them
By Uwem Akpan
Little, Brown and Company
Review by Rachel Finn
“When they ask you,” she says sternly, without look-
ing at me, “say you’re one of them, OK?”
“Who?”
“Anybody. You have to learn to take care of Jean,
Monique. You just have to, huh?” (p. 327)
These are the haunting words uttered by the Tutsi
mother to her ten-year-old, multiethnic daughter
(Hutu-Tutsi) living in the time of the Rwandan geno-
cide of 1994 from which Nigerian author Uwem
Akpan’s collection of five short stories draws its title.
Set in Kenya, Benin, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Ethiopia,
the various stories depict the tenderness and cruelty
that seem to exist in tandem in the lives of the char-
acters, giving the reader a child’s eye view of the
chaos that greed, mismanagement, and indifference
have wreaked on lives throughout the continent.
In the story, “Fattening for Gabon,” a brother and
sister in Benin cope with the consequences of their
uncle’s indecision about selling them into slavery.
The story starts with the startling opening lines:
“Selling your child or nephew could be more dif-
ficult than selling other kids. You had to keep a calm
head or be as ruthless as the Badagry-Seme immi-
gration people. If not, it could bring trouble to the
family. What kept our family-secret from the world
in the three months Fofo Kpee planned to sell us
were his sense of humor and the smuggler’s instinct
he had developed as an abero, a tout, at the bor-
der. My sister Yewa was five and I was ten.” (p. 39)
Akpan’s storytelling leaves the reader breathless as
he moves slowly through the days and nights in the
40 mosaicmagazine.org
stifling heat of the shack they call home. Slowly, both
the reader and the oldest child Kotchikpa begin to
understand the horrifying truth: Fofo Kepe, their
uncle, plans to sell them into slavery in Gabon.
Three of the other stories are set against the back-
drop of violent religious and ethnic conflict. “Luxu-
rious Hearses” follows sixteen-year-old Jubril as he
comes to terms with his faith, Islam, and learns the
value and meaning of tolerance during the course of
a fateful bus ride across Nigeria. “My Parents’ Bed-
room” set in Rwanda offers a heartbreaking glimpse
of a family shattered by the violent ethnic strife and
genocide of the 1994 war, giving a human face to
the incomprehensible crime of genocide. In “What
Language Is That?”, perhaps the most touching sto-
ry, is also the shortest in the book. Set in Ethiopia,
it is the tale of two young girls, one Christian and
one Muslim who have become best friends. It is told
from the point of view of an outsider recounting the
girls’ close friendship. The story poignantly shows
the absurd nature of conflict based on religious dif-
ferences—from the opening scene where the girls
are having lunch in a local café, to its sad yet hope-
ful ending. Finally there is the bleak “An Ex-Mas
Feast,” the tale of an abjectly poor family living in
the slums of Nairobi. The parents of twelve-year-old
Maisha rely on her earnings as a prostitute to keep
the family afloat while forcing their other children
out into the streets as beggars. In one scene, while
waiting for Maisha to return with Christmas dinner,
the mother offers her son Jigana, a bottle filled with
glue to sniff in order to kill his hunger pangs after
breathing in the fumes herself and passing it to oth-
er family members.
Akpan’s exquisitely written stories enkindle the
reader’s emotions and allow space for us to reflect
upon the whys and wherefores of his characters’
lives. The legacy of colonialism haunts these stories
and as moving as it is to view these worlds through
the eyes of children, it is even more fascinating to
consider what drives the adults whose careless ac-
tions set the tragic events of the five tales in motion
and put these children at risk. The book also begs
the questions: who bears responsibility and who
must be held accountable for the turmoil, self-hate,
and vicious inhumanity that plague Africa today?
And while one would be remiss in giving an overly
simplistic answer to that question, Say You’re One
Of Them helps make it clear that there is no one
who can change Africa but Africans themselves.
Somebody Scream
By Marcus Reeves
Faber and Faber
Review by Sidik Fofana
In Somebody Scream, hip-hop adopts a broader role
in the context of African-American history. Accord-
ing to Marcus Reeves’s book on the storied genre’s
major movements, hip-hop seceded the Black
Power Movement of the 1960s as a cultural force
for minorities in the United States to latch on. Of
course, Reeves discusses the rise of acts like Public
Enemy and Run DMC, but his analysis takes into ac-
count COINTELPRO, Assata Shakur’s murder trial,
and other key political events that have fueled their
post Civil Rights aesthetic. He depicts rap music as a
natural evolution from these watershed moments.
No book about hip-hop history is complete without
a thorough study of Public Enemy and the haloed
ensemble’s contributions to rap music. Although
Reeves starts his analysis fairly early in the book, he
is careful to avoid sanctifying the group. Whereas
most written accounts paint Public Enemy’s music
as a perfect amalgam of angst and intellect, Reeves
shows instances where the group’s political fervor
was misguided. In the chapter entitled, “Stumbling
through Black Power Revisited,” he writes about
an anti-Semitic comment that band member Griff
made during an interview for The Washington Times,
“The explosive fallout began a month later following
a reprint of Griff’s comments in The Village Voice.
Jewish groups like the militant Jewish Defense Or-
ganization began protesting against P.E. The main-
stream media began shining an anti-Semitic light on
the group, helping to strain black-Jewish relations as
folks began to take sides in the debacle.”
More importantly, Somebody Scream shows that
Public Enemy and other hip-hop artists were not in
an ageless vacuum when they conceived their mas-
terpieces. On several occasions, the book makes the
distinction that these groups were not making pro-
test music just because it was cool, but in response
to the tense social climate of the day. Reeve writes
about Reaganomics, Yusef Hawkins’s murder, and
Jesse Jackson’s 1988 stint for presidency under the
guise that these events motivated hip-hop’s lyrical
content. To him, this on-record activism is akin to
the militant efforts of the Black Panthers and other
Civil Rights organizations.
Just as early hip-hop transitions from the Black
Power Movement of the 60s and 70s, Somebody
Scream notes the point when the conscious music
of Public Enemy shifts to the gangsta rap of Death
Row Records. Reeves dedicates two chapters to Dr.
Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur, documenting
the rise of hardcore west coast hip-hop. Yet, Reeves
does not spare the aggressive music from having its
own share of political undertones. This connection
is not all too far-fetched given that California rap’s
41
 prominence coincided with the Rodney King beat-
ings and the L.A. Race Riots. In “Gangsta Chic,”
Reeves points out that, “As the L.A. riots placed the
city at the epicenter of American political discourse
by turning black Los Angeles into a worldwide sym-
bol of oppression, black rage, and victimization,
they also turned the gangsta and the gangbanger
into emblems of strength, fearlessness, and street-
level empowerment.” Whereas gangster rappers
were once vilified by the media, these social cir-
cumstances turned them into urban soothsayers,
reporting on the uproar of their own communities.
Somebody Scream’s final movement documents
hip-hop’s marriage to capitalism and extreme com-
moditization. These chapters perhaps represent
Reeves at his strongest as he wields through an
era that he does not necessarily hold in the high-
est regard. Sean “Puffy” Combs headlines Reeve’s
discussion of the genre’s developed obsession with
diamonds and shiny suits. Although the multimedia
mogul is often blamed for adulterating rap’s politi-
cal message with meretricious showcases of wealth,
Reeves reminds readers that Combs is foundation-
ally as hardworking and relentless as anyone in the
music business. The chapter, “Ghetto Fab Rising”
refers to a celebrity/benefit basketball game Puffy
threw at City College in New York in 1991 during
which nine people were killed in a stampede. In-
stead of letting the public relations nightmare deter
him, Reeves writes, “…Puffy resurfaced the next
year as a musical dynamo.” He grants each period
in hip-hop its share of recognition and acknowledg-
es its contributions to the history in whole.
Somebody Scream is not a nostalgic glimpse back in
the golden age, but rather an objective document of
hip-hop defining epochs and the social milestones
that influenced them. The painstakingly researched
42 mosaicmagazine.org
book is now required reading for a class at Brooklyn
College and is being compared to Jeff Chang’s Can’t
Stop, Won’t Stop in terms of its thoroughness and
wide-ranging subject matter. With this book, rap’s
archives have grown that much more stronger as
Reeves, with his culturally astute eye, records the
timeless hands of hip-hop history.
When the Black Girl Sings
By Bil Wright
Simon & Schuster
Review by C. Chekejai Coley
Bil Wright takes on the complex issue of transracial
adoption in When the Black Girl Sings (WBGS).
WBGS is about an eighth-grade African-American
girl named Lahni who was adopted by white parents
who are, incidentally, in the midst of a separation.
Throughout the book Lahni is witnessing the downfall
of her parent’s relationship and is struggling to deal
with their inevitable divorce. This is compounded
by the anger that she feels for her adoptive father,
Tim, while trying to be a support for her mother
Ursula. In this time she is also confronted with a
white boy’s taunting and his perverse attempts to
get her attention. To add to the challenges Lahni is
also working on a singing competition in school.
Overall, Wright’s work gives some credence to
the idea that despite racial differences there can
be some level of success in transracial adoptions.
There are some things, like a mother’s desire to
protect her young, to be affirmative of them, and
to encourage them that are just human expressions
of love. All of these things come into play in the
relationship between Lahni and Ursula. Even during
the turmoil of the separation from her husband,
Ursula assures Lahni of her love and commitment
to her. Alternately, Wright also highlights the
social and personal challenges of children in
these arrangements and the inability of parents of
one race to truly nurture a child of another race
through a “color-blind versus color-conscious.”
In the color-blind approach to raising Lahni she
often recognizes her displacement because she
is often misunderstood by those closest to her.
Lahni lacks exposure to African-American culture
in virtually every area. She does have an expressed
desire and need to connect with others more like her
and is unable to come to terms with who she is as an
African American in her predominantly white settings.
Ursula decides that she and Lahni should attend
church—in part because she thinks that Lahni may
be able to meet some other African-American youth.
The church they attend is nondenominational and
although the congregation is racially mixed, the choir
is predominantly black. There are no other African-
American youth for Lahni to meet but miraculously,
she experiences a turning point during the service
when she is moved by the choir’s rendition of
“Amazing Grace.” She finds some inspiration and is
prompted to then join the church choir.
The book falls short in some areas. In many ways
it’s predictable, non-progressive, and it reinforces
stereotypes about blacks. For example, although
Lahni wears Afro puffs as an assertion of herself,
she refers to her hair as “woolly.” Woolly is a term
that is often used by those who have accepted the
negative reference to the hair of blacks (it falls along
the lines of “peasy.” “nappy,” “bad” and other like
terms). It was also used quite a bit in Uncle Tom’s
Cabin.
Another limitation in the book is the introduction of
the idea of homosexuality where the choir director,
Marcus, is concerned. When Lahni first meets him
she surmises from his attire that he may be gay. There
is never a real examination of his sexual preference
and the relationship that develops between Lahni and
Marcus is purely musical. The mention of his sexual
orientation is almost pointless.
Ultimately, although there are constant reminders of
race throughout the book, there is no real resolve
for Lahni in this area. In the end she has no positive
exposure to black culture—not even through the
church experience. She does expand a little socially
through her relationship with the church choir, but
there is no real development in terms of gaining racial
or cultural understanding. What tends to be sad to the
point of tragic in the book is that she doesn’t develop
any real relationships outside of the realm of music.
As expected, Lahni does win the competition—a
“happily ever after,” anti-climatic and predictable
finish. While singing the song “His Eye Is on the
Sparrow” during the competition, she has an
epiphany of sorts. She comes to the conclusion that
she has been “divinely” protected and gathers a
cerebral understanding of protection by a higher
force. It is as if the musical experience coupled by
the cerebral understanding of protection by a higher
power supersedes the prevalent issue: Race. But even
her musical odyssey does not bring her much closer
to a real understanding of herself. Though the songs
have been sung, and quite well, by blacks in black
churches, the songs “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” and
“Amazing Grace” are not actually African-American
spirituals. One of the songs was written by an
enslaver—the other, also written by whites, is often
played at funerals. Did someone die? 
43
 dous numbers of black people locked up steadily
declines in the same way it steadily rose.
TB: Since we both grew up in Kankakee, Illinois,
do you ever see our hometown popping up in
your writing? I felt this sense of place and speech,
even though neither of your novels features the
town.
KB: Well, I am who I am. I was shaped and molded
there. It pops up in every word I write. Most of my
observations about love, death, sickness, hardship,
and love again were shaped there at a very young
age because I grew up with a very large family on
both parents’ sides. I was used to being around a
lot of adults even though I was young. And they
loved to talk and tell stories, which I still remember.
Of course, there are certainly environmental factors
which contribute to the ultimate psychological tem-
plate one develops, but for the most part human
nature is fairly, predictably consistent—regardless
of place. Certainly, the impact of jail and prison on
people’s lives was a subject I was passionate about
because people will pay attention to an injustice
or disproportionate number of convicts in Harlem,
but little pockets of our country such as Kankakee,
simply go uncharted and unnoticed in these dis-
cussions. One of the strongest memories inform-
ing Conception for me was the way in which preg-
nancy, abortion, and contraception were handled
on a government level in a poor community with a
consistently high teen pregnancy rate. There will al-
ways be a little girl from Kankakee, Illinois, inside of
me throwing in her two cents. I can’t really separate
myself from it at this point.
TB: Speaking of place, you won an award for
an excerpt of a novel that you wrote before Up-
state. Would you please talk a little bit about that
44 mosaicmagazine.org
work?
KB: I wanted to write rather than work 80 hours
a week consulting after I graduated U of C. I was
a medical secretary by day for almost a year and
writing my little heart out at night. The book took
a while to finish because it was my first, but I was
blessed to have had agents fighting over me when I
sent it out. I won a 2001 Illinois Arts Council Artist
Fellowship in Prose for my first stab at a novel. It was
entitled The Junction, and that was the nickname
of the tiny circular neighborhood where I grew up
in Kankakee. It was at a railroad junction, with a
graveyard right in back. I liked the name because it
connoted distance, journey, travel, a change, which
could be applied in so many ways metaphorically
and character wise. So, I wanted to write a histori-
cal novel about three generations of a family who
had migrated south to a northern place called The
Junction. And even better, our annual Summerfest
picnic in Kankakee is where a crime is committed in
the early 1920s that informed the rest of the cen-
tury for the family. The novel was actually shopped
on the market in 2001, well before my first book,
but it was passed on for reasons that are now much
clearer to me since I am more experienced as a
writer and a published author. I made the mistake
so many novelists make with that first work—they
think it will be their only work. It was a massive
book, with more tangents than I could reasonably
engage and fulfill. I have actually borrowed some
writing from it because since it was my first time,
I can really see some passion in a lot of it. It was a
joy to write because more than anything I’ve ever
written, my hometown was hands down the model
for setting. It will always be my baby, even if it never
sees the light of day.
TB: With all the talk of MFAs and PhDs and
how difficult it is for writers to find work in
this economy, do you think it has impacted
your time at the University of Chicago? Do you
think it’s a valuable experience for writers?
KB: Writers should not approach the academy or
a degree program thinking that they don’t have to
work and will be flouncing around writing. A de-
gree program should be a well-thought out strategic
move, which will allow your knowledge and hope-
fully bank account to increase. But getting back
into the mentality of being a student is not easy
and there is a lot of work, all of which will harm
most creative writers’ productivity. If you are a real
writer you will always write no matter what, but
your mind does slow down after having to write so
much for school. I wanted my MFA in creative writ-
ing because after The Junction, despite the rejection
of it for publication, I was not going to give up on
my dream of writing. I had always wanted to live in
New York City; I felt that is where the heart of pub-
lishing was. I wanted to be there so I matriculated to
the New School. I first began to think of a PhD with
a concentration on black female culture when I was
an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. I
was recruited to a program funded by the Mellon
Foundation to work towards a career in academic
research, and mentored by black studies professors
who are still mentoring me to this day.
I learned a lot of what other people wanted me to
learn at U of C, but I was able to develop the tools
to go out and learn what I wanted to learn through
academic research. That appealed to me, but I was
not ready to commit because I knew that the dream
of writing would nag me until I felt I had proven
to myself that I could do it. I got two novels out
of the way before I went back for a PhD, and the
first draft of Upstate was actually my thesis for the
MFA. My vision for myself is to contribute to the
establishment and visibility of black women’s stud-
ies for young minds that are interested, but have not
been exposed. A PhD makes sense for me because
I am earning my entrance and respect in that envi-
ronment to make the impact I want to make. If it
were not for my desire to change institutions and
the visibility of black women’s studies, then I would
probably be wasting my time because this is not a
trust-funded pursuit! As long as the objectives are
clear, and people are not going into it thinking that
they are fancy free to write and waste time, the uni-
versities are provocative, inspiring, and resourceful
environments for writers.
TB: I know you’re balancing critical and creative
writing now, so could you talk a little more about
those projects and how you create the time and
space for writing?
KB: I’m taking it easy with creative writing right now.
I think I have proven myself for now. I have a lot on
my plate with trying to work towards a PhD in lit-
erature and promote the two works that I have out
there. I also moved back to Chicago to work on the
degree, and I have family and friends in Illinois who
love me. Those relationships are important to me
so I don’t have the same level of reclusiveness that I
achieved in New York. I’m also devoting more time
to cooking whole foods, exercising, and dating, so
it’s hard to get insanely deep into a creative writing
project right now. I am always writing a little some-
thing something. The caveat for me, at this time, is
holding back from obsessing over a work or idea be-
cause I just don’t have the time and space to obsess
about what’s in my head right now. Reality is a bit
more immediate at this time. That is what is hard to
communicate at this level. Unfortunately, the public
has been conditioned to associate writers and writ-
45
 ing with product; the question more often than not
is “Are you working on a new book?” rather than
“Have you been practicing your writing?” The latter
is a more considerate question because down peri-
ods can be frustrating. The way I and most writers I
know cope with that is by making sure that we do a
little something when we can, even if it is a couple
of paragraphs or lines. This is a lifelong practice for
me. My goal as a writer is to stay healthy and whole,
not to push myself to the point that what I produce
is not even worth reading. I can’t tell that popular lie
and say I write every day because I don’t, and I re-
ally don’t want to despite innumerable writers tell-
ing me that’s the way. I view the best characters and
stories as gifts or guests who take a long time to get
here and finally wear out their welcomes once they
do. Given that, I’m more than content to relax and
just wait for them to show up when they want to.
TB: I noticed that you’re focused on black female
dramatists. I’m wondering who intrigues you and
why?
KB: I want to do some fun research in the long run,
and theater is usually fun. I don’t know where my
interests will ultimately land or what the subject
of a dissertation will be at this point, but I know
that I am committed to illuminating the brilliance
of as many black female artists as I can. Classes or
conferences are never built around black women
who write plays. Although I love them, there has
been more than Suzan-Lori Parks, Lorraine Hans-
berry, Pearl Cleage, Anna Deveare-Smith, and Nto-
zake Shange. There has been Alice Childress, Beah
Richards, most people don’t even know that Denise
Nicholas (author of Freshwater Road) was an actress
and noted playwright of the 1970s. After the De-
pression, the number of community theaters spear-
headed by black women increased phenomenally.
46 mosaicmagazine.org
Many of those theaters are still running. As writers
and theater developers, black women have certain-
ly impacted the American theater scene in a way
that is not talked about, so why not be the one to
talk about it? It is an exciting time for black theater
right now, it is really growing and major stars are
developing. It’s a great time to resurrect a lot of that
information and see how far we’ve come.
TB: Since you’ve been working on critical writing
and dramatic work, what are some of the differ-
ences in the genres? How does it feel when you
are writing in each one?
KB: You know, I just love to write. Even my emails
and text messages are long! I truly love the written
word. I would like to master all its forms. It’s easier
for me to talk about what these forms share over
how they’re different, because that’s a whole other
story. They all share the challenge of facing a blank
page, harnessing your mind and translating your si-
lent, ever-changing ideas into a format that others
can understand. That’s a tall order no matter what
genre you are working in. The actual labor of the
process is the same for me no matter what it is. It’s
frightening and daunting, but alive and hopeful at
the same time. I love writing dialogue, so I’ve found
it a little easier to tangle through dramatic writing.
Sometimes it’s tiring, especially when it’s late and
you can’t remember what page had that very im-
portant fact or detail that you need to remember for
another page!
Critical writing can be more frustrating for me, a
lot more scientific in the sense of making sure all
your t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted. It involves
organizing a massive amount of information, con-
necting and contrasting that information, while also
including others’ information in your conclusions,
not to mention the stylistic and technical tenets of
the discipline. The standard language in academic
disciplines, and learning that language has been a
huge challenge for me because it gets just about as
erudite as it can at this level.
I hope that my experience as a creative writer will al-
low me to ultimately translate my discoveries about
our culture to mass audiences who don’t normally
pick up scholarly work. Angela Davis, bell hooks,
Dorothy Roberts, Harryette Mullen, and Farah Jas-
mine Griffin are guiding examples of that important
work. 
When I came to the US it was the height of the
Black Power Movement. My brother and his friends
were students of Black Power. I grew up with Afros
and big earrings, and as a result of the Black Power
Movement there was a deep appreciation for things
Caribbean because it’s about reflecting on your
own life.
DSM: How did you become an authority on par-
enting?
OPA: When I came out to California in 1979, I
didn’t have any money. I had to work. I could teach
part time but I didn’t have a teaching credential.
So before I went for the masters I decided I would
get a teaching credential in early childhood. I was a
head teacher for a while, which is where a part of
my sensibilities around parenting developed. When
I was working with black parents in and around
the Presidio, I noticed that many did not have the
skills to be a parent. I partnered with a sister named
Marsha King, who used to be the head of childcare
in Oakland and Fruitvale who had asked me to do
storytelling. I did a series of storytelling for her and
we ended up forming a very successful children’s
theater company for about four years with seven-
teen kids. I did all the writing and the drama about
Caribbean and African history. In 1980, we were
the first to do a Kwanzaa piece in the Bay Area.
I started to look at what it meant to be a parent.
When I had my own kids people would ask me for
advice. A social worker asked me to a workshop
and I never say no to anything. It was very success-
ful, so I did another. That’s how I ended up doing
the parenting show for NPR for four years.
DSM: You never say no to anything?
47
 OPA: I don’t. When an opportunity comes to me, if
it’s not utterly offensive, but something that’s going
to give me an opportunity to grow and exercise in
a way that I haven’t, I’m going to say yes. I’m going
to learn what I need to know to master that and be
successful at it. I tell my kids that. I know that Ca-
ribbean people are known to be resourceful—my
mother was a very resourceful woman. She raised
us by herself, and back then, people didn’t just
throw away things; if something was wrong, you
learned how to fix it. My mother would tinker with
things that other women would not because they
had husbands. So she learned how to fix things and
she never said no. She played the organ at church,
started a drama group for the cane workers, and she
started a credit union. If someone was in need, she
never said no. She went ahead and did it. I get that
trait from her and I’ve passed it on to my kids.
DSM: Have you been involved with the arts com-
munity a lot the last few years?
OPM: I used to be very involved in community
projects, but lately I’ve wanted to get more writing
done. I didn’t feel like I was being as productive as
I wanted to be. A lot of my friends who were much
older have died without finishing projects. Writing
is the most important thing me now, and I wanted
to get some stuff out, which is why I’m going to Ja-
maica. I want to leave work behind. Right now I just
want to do the work.
DSM: How would you define craft?
OPM: Craft is having the time to make your sen-
tences shimmer. I look at Jamaica Kincaid. I may
not always agree with her point of view, but her
sentences are incredible. She’s a wicked sentence
constructor! She has been fortunate that she came
48 mosaicmagazine.org
here as an artist, married the grandson of a founder
of the New York Times and has the luxury and time
to write full time. I look at Diaz’s book The Brief and
Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, and I love the humor.
I love the voice. He has had the time to be a full-
time writer and it shows. Alice Walker had the time
to write full time. I think it makes a big difference
in what you write, how you write, and how much
you produce. It took me four years to finish my first
novel because I was raising kids, teaching, work-
ing in the community. My sister took my kids for
two weeks for the three summers I finished my first
novel. One week, I wrote twelve hours a day. I got
a residency in North Carolina and wrote for twelve
hours a day. That made a big difference in the flow.
I wasn’t trying to catch up or remember. No kids
banging on the door. I’m proud of my first novel,
but it took four years. When I have the summer or
three months, I think it affects the quality and flow
of what I write. It affects the craft.
DSM: What do you think is the power of the
word?
OPA: For me it’s healing every time I write, regard-
less of what I write about. Every time us, as black
people, write about us and our stories it’s part of a
quilt that is making us whole. Our entrance into the
new world was fragmented, the middle passage did
that, and writing is about healing that rupture, that
kidnap, that breakage from history, that one-third
human we’re still trying to throw off. The word is
balm. The word is healing. The word is the thing
that is making us whole. 
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51
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