Sarah Fabio lecture on contemporary black verse at the University of Iowa, May 8, 1970

Speaker 1: The Broadcasting Service of the University of Iowa, in cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American Studies Program at the University, presents a series of programs by Black specialists as material for the University's course Afro-American Literature. The lecture for this week is Sarah Fabio from the University of California at Berkeley speaking on Contemporary Black Verse. Sarah Fabio: Today, I've promised to read from my own poetry. Possibly, what I would have to say about myself is that I sort of live a stereophonic life. And my poetry probably reflects that. Of course, being a very sensitive person, I respond to all of the stimuli in my environment. And I feel that that's only human, that I should respond. I don't think of myself as a so-called protest poet although, I am a social critic. And I tell it like it is and read it like I see it. You see? And to do otherwise, I think, would simply be dishonest and be selling my vision of the world short and continue to give America the false image of itself that it continues to give itself, which is actually causing it to die of disbelief. The credibility gap in America is becoming greater and greater. It really is. And the quicker we hold the mirror up to ourselves and really see ourselves as we are. And stop playing that mirror in mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all and keep saying, I am. You know? Sarah Fabio: In a book that I had to publish myself called, A mirror, a soul. I've said in my introduction that there are two Americas and each has its own language. For the exiled European who strongly identifies with the colonial ruling power standardized English is adopted. And this leans from the prototype of the Oxfordian, a Bostonian variety, to the more familiar journalese which approaches an American idiom. But for the Black man, robbed of language along with other accoutrement of human rights, he had to create a new mother tongue which would approximate his Black experience in America. Straining his ear in his person, it's possible for the Black man also to adopt standard patterns of language. And as the possibility of a truly democratic America is evidence, he leans more toward the American idiomatic speech. Sarah Fabio: But for that great bulk of American Blacks who are and have always been outside the pale of America, there is a Black mother tongue born out of necessity from a period where not only were their bodies shackled, their minds enslaved, but their tongues were tied. And then, I said this volume of man is a bilingual, if not a trilingual, volume of poetry. Now, let me explain. Of course, the bilingual would be using Black language and using standard patterns. And then, the trilingual would take in the consideration that having lived 40 years in America, that I will have to have gone through a period of being Negro. Then, there is probably a negro strain that you would see running through. Sarah Fabio: In teaching Afro-American literature, I would say that you could follow two tributaries. One of Black literature from very early with African survival forms and one of assimilationist Negro literature. And both of them are real given the nature of the Black experience in America. Of course, in terms of helping with the identity of the Black we would have to lean toward the one that spells out what being Black is. Formula for liberation. And this one is from the mirror side. Sarah Fabio: America, land of the free racist sick whites. Continue with your madness, your inhumanity, your quest for your manifold destiny and exploit the non-white peoples of the world. And all of the true leaders of the Third World, those damnably oppressed and suffer in multitudes, expose this vicious system. And all of you beautiful Black people, wherever you are, whose lives are constantly on the lands now as always, explode. Blow up all of these irrelevancies now and let it all hang out. Reckon in our June 6, 1968. America, again today you stopped your clocks at the midnight hour and you hold back the dawn of your new day. Awake you zombies from your nightmarish dreams and stop walking in your sleeps. It's AM now. After Malcolm, after Medgar, after Martin. Why do you hate yourselves? You have killed and maimed your Black, best, bright, sons. And now, senselessly, you turn inward slaughtering your own white hope. Sarah Fabio: What to you are the bright-eyed Bobby's? Bobby Hutton, slain unknown 18-year-old Panther cut down like an animal. Bobby Kennedy, 42-year-old would-be president gunned down like game while running in the ill-starred race. Both of these, your sons have met their common fate in your lands and state. That horror house creator of your monstrous Frankenstein's, and vampire men, and mafia, and Tarzan, and the Disney animal world of your white fantasies. Awake, America. Shake off the nightmare of our time. The midnight hour is now. The grandfather hands have stopped the clock. Is there no electrifying shock to start the counterpoise parts to work again? Are you drugged? Or mad? Or is it that you are only from your white and marble tombs casting shadows and voicing echoes of the living dead? Sarah Fabio: And I have one out of the, in that vein. A Lesson Twice Learned, Never to be Forgotten. For John John Kennedy. John, John. See, see. The ceremony's on. Hear, hear, the drum roll swell salute another passing soldier. Learn, learn your lesson well. Once there was a warrior, whose heart and hair flowed red. Who stood to cheer his people and gunshot felled him dead. This man had a brother who rose as did the first. And as he neared victory, gunshot his life's dream burst. Other brave men of our times: Martin, Malcolm, Medgar, stood as men to be counted and gunshot felled them forever. John, John. See, see. The ceremony's on. Hear, hear the drum roll swell. Teach, teach the young to suffer. You've learned your lesson well. Sarah Fabio: And this one is called, Whose Turf, Whose Land. White reaction. Black response. A short drama and around. White reaction. My turf. This Ivy League reserve where I, and my kind, educate and get educated. Where I meditate, and postulate, and make, and run my gang. Where in the aura of refinement and whip, I am commissioned by society, and state, and by birthright, as son of the great white father to preserve the status quo. To uphold the law of the land which means, which names me master of all S of A. I am the fair-haired hope and I know it. I, of the Holy pilgrim progeny, of the lately arrived and Europeanized pure Aryan stock. And like that godmother befriended bumpkin of lore, I too, shall turn my pumpkin into a horse powered coach before my exit from the last grand ball. And who are you? Who dare to rumble at the door of my hallowed hall? And how dare you to be so rude as to presume a right to intrude within my war proof sanctuary? Sarah Fabio: Black response. My land. I am native here. I am the Black, brown, red, and yellow horde. Afro-American, Chicano, Indian, [Nisi], Afro-Asian, age old or young. What is that you say? Who? Afro what? Afro who? I am not the new occidental and accidental Lord. I serve warning on you who use these institutions as incubators of your mad greed that they, if proven worthy to exist, must in the future serve a [nobleny] Separatists. Remember the good old melting pot. Red, red, red. The whole bunch. That Black, brown, red, and yellow horde. Yes, yes. I am hood, hoodlum, gang come to claim from robber barons what should have been my birthright. I have come late prepared to fight war upon these green grounds looking down on my baron ghettoed world riddled with a thousand worms of want. I come to share your spoils. I come prepared to do more. Sarah Fabio: To take these spoils and turn them into proud symbols of a truly democratic America. Hoods. Hoodlums. Gangs. Robbers. Riots. Loss. Law and order. It's a disgrace. That's what it is. Worms, worms, spoilsport. How can a motley crew like you have the hypocrisy to speak of democracy? You Daniel Boons, David Crocketts, sons of Genghis Khan and Christopher Columbus, and Leopold, and Stanley, and Livingstones. You discoverers of lands, people by civilizations which are grandfathers to yours. It is here, this ceding ground, that is your last frontier. Now, I am the bold invader from within, come to claim, to collect a claim undeniably and rightfully mine. Great white fathers all first-class citizens beyond doubt. What? Sarah Fabio: Savages. Savages. Remember the peace treaties, territorial rights, land grant. How dare you intrude at this hour of my great triumph? It is not the Vietcong who've crippled me with centuried wrong. It is not the red, yellow peril who have duped me into a bottomless pit filled with promises never realized. I have identified my enemy. I've shared, shackle and chain. I've come prepared to fight by any means necessary. You who are my peers. Now, look at him out. Don't get excited. You're not being objective. You're becoming emotional again. And you can't trust the Vietcong. Remember the Japs. Don't forget those yellow devils responsible for fireworks and population explosion. I come bitter with denials. I come scarred from a turbulent past. I come empty of hope for justice and achieving my just demands. And now, it is in combat of man and hand that we too must stand face-to-face and decide at long last, whose turf, whose land. Sarah Fabio: Those are some of the poems from A Mirror and some of the poems that I have written recently. And from the Soul side I tried to address a Black audience who does not have to be a literate one. A Black audience who wishes to communicate and to experience through poetry some of their past. This is called, Soul Through a Lickin' Stick. Sarah Fabio: My Black Ma sure knows her thing. Her scar-faced spoon is her big stick. And with this wooden scepter she rules her world with a lick. In her backyard there are no money trees to prune her switches from, but she can lay as good a whipping on your behind as if she'd used some Georgia pine. Then, she can brush off the bruises and really get down deep into her pot and cook. I mean, burn a lot. She whips up the best soul food you've ever had. And her cakes, pies, and cobblers, man, they're really bad. Her Ma and her Ma's Ma taught her all she knows. And they got their nits and grits from down home and it shows. Anyway, she wields that stick. I mean, loving like or bold, you're going to get from that licking stick a whole lots of soul. Sarah Fabio: And another one called, Resoled. For my favorite shoe maker, a man who saved a million soles, Walter Parks. This man really lives in Atlanta, Georgia. And I went to school around the same time that Martin Luther King went to Morehouse. I went to an all-girls school, Spelman. And he fixed my shoes all the time. His daughter lives in California with me and she's an artist. And often, she will do a piece of artwork and I might illustrate it with a poem. This one is called, Resoled. Sarah Fabio: Why should I wish to discard my old shoes because the soles were thin? They're a perfect fit, one which I feel comfortable in. The leather is tried and true and dyed to my special few. And there's no mistaking it. The shape exactly fits and I'll declare this just enough room to spare. So, I'll keep them. I'll wear them to walk my special walk. And as for those worn thin holes, well, I'll fix them up with some brand new soles. Sarah Fabio: Someone asked me, did I have a poem that I thought was more about me than others. And I have this one that hasn't been published called, Sassafras Toned, My Grandma Sat. I don't know how many of you are familiar with sassafras, but a lot of old Black people would drink sassafras tea. Sassafras, I think, is sort of herb like that becomes the seasoning for root beer. Sarah Fabio: Sassafras toned, my grandma sat stolidly silent, squaw-like, 30 years past her promise three score and ten. Despair, depressions, death dismissed with a nod and a whispered prayer. The Lord giveth and taketh. Her silences were punctuated by proverbs and metaphors. Pretty is as pretty does was her favorite yardstick to squelch easy praise. Her words, so sparse, became precious. Quarrels were beyond her. And having entered one she soon gave the final word. Going to lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside, down by the riverside, down by the riverside. I'd play for her, time and time again, on the pianos of my childhood. And often, I'd wonder how she managed that in Tennessee where rivers were scarce, and was sure she'd tripped herself into a fatal lie. But then, when time came snowing down to claim her that winter, she gave up her world in a quiet room overlooking the red clay muddied waters of the Cumberland River. Sarah Fabio: From a volume called, My Own Thing. There's one called, Being Together. If only we could embrace each other's words and honest admiration or at least respect. Relish our divergences. And could class, by man's unconscious intercourse, rock and roll together on the age old seabed of shared human need? Crest of waves of jubilation being propelled there by our own free willing notions, and motions, and an attended mutuality. Well, we'd for real be into something gone and still we'd have a thing going. Can you dig it? Sarah Fabio: Are My Own Thing. Like this hand-sized bit of driftwood sanded, beaten, reshaped. Straying from its roots in some distant corner of the world, I stand. Always at the mercy of the elements: weather, tide, currents, who can but wonder that both of us would lose our once pure form. But, like it, I have now become my own thing. And like this gnarled shape, yet with a balanced, graceful line; hard, rough, still radiating life, I have too retained the spark, the grain. I pick it up, this driftwood, this thing another man might toss aside as waste. I pick it up, this mojo working its magic, this divining stick and really dig the power that it brings because it is my own thing. Sarah Fabio: I have a volume called, Soul Ain't: Soul Is. From that one, I'd like to read a poem in memory of Langston Hughes, who for almost a half century was acknowledged dean of American Negro reports and the spiritual father of the race, who died May 1967. Moving in an earthy way like clover in the wind carrying with it the flavor of oak, sawdust, thyme, burlap, tobacco, beer, turnip, sassafras, honeysuckle and wildly luscious lemons and lime. Mushrooming like shantytowns with outhouses warmly facing south and junky joints pulsing in a profusion of down home beats beamed from the United ghettos of America, home of the Black native sons. Moving like old shoes wearing faces of simple soles coddling to their daily existences in the complex worlds of the dark Harlems like a river cutting new beds, wasting bass banked walls, twisting and turning toward a new course deepening with the years: sometimes widening, sometimes narrowing, sometimes drying up, exposing a naked sunbaked rough walled clay. Sarah Fabio: Moving in a folksy way like the parson's sermon filled with fire and brimstone and peace in a valley, lulled by Solomon songs to a dream deferred, which rots, explodes, and dries up like a raisin in the sun. Like a son who learns where it's at through weather lipped words of a mother as she reveals the metaphor of her life succinctly with a head shake and an admission. Life for me ain't been no crystal stair, moving like a Ray Charles blues number where while drawn in a syncopated tune it cries the light of tears bright enough to make a blind man see. Like a merry-go-round swirling forever on in carousel gaiety for all but one lonely girl who watches from the sidelines wishing with all her heart to join the ride, but demanding to know at the onset where is the seat for a child who's Black? Sarah Fabio: And another one for For My People, A Jubilee for Margaret Walker. Something all our own you saw as our great need beyond bread, and shoes, and land, and money. A history, a past and future, a day of glory all our own. And when you ask yourself, "What am I to give for my people?" you gave a jubilee. For Black people who sang their slave songs, dirges, ditties, blues and jubilees and prayed their long nights prayers from Rampart Street to Lenox Avenue and 47th Street, who tried and tired of trying to fashion a better way from confusion, but who remained believers in spite of whip, and lariat, and bayonet, and being preyed on by facile force of state and false prophet. A jubilee heralding the new world aborning into a beauty of healing and strength and caring and knowing and understanding. Yes. We have been believers and you give us faith in our great belief. You who give your love, and sweat, and tears, and blood, and life. For my people. Sarah Fabio: And book that will soon be published, one for which Don Lee wrote the introduction called, Black Back, Back Black. Black back. Back home again. Black back all the way back. Black. Dig. Back into my own thing. Check it out. Black from the tips of my Black kinks to the hard earth-caked soles of my feet. Dig. To the bruised dark blood of my being. To the core of my Black soul. Dig. And the Black eye of my imagination, to the Black image of my God, to the Black idea of beauty and wisdom flowing naturally from this Black thing. Dig. Check it out. I'm Black again. Back Black, Black back. Check it out. Be Black back, be back Black. Check it out. Be back Black now. Black back now. Check it out. Dig. Sarah Fabio: You'll notice on your campuses, Black people in their African tight dress and hairstyles. And this poem is sort of about that. And it's called, Glimpses of an Image. Glimpses of an image of ourselves, now, from glints of our past to wear like a mask of our Black nature for all to know us by: a garment, pose, smile; a grimace, stance, style, tattoos on oaken souls, carvings on mahogany hearts. Thinly veiled, see the she-child, clasping hands, nimbly leap into ritual dance ushering in the green spring. So young, fresh, firmly planted these patterning feet on the drumming earth. Enrobed. See Hannibal, Othello, and shades like ivy along the walls of Timbuktu, regally sunning in embellished courtyards of Cairo and Addis Ababa. And behind them, the splendor of the Pyramids enjewelled splendidly and perfumed. See Aida, Cleopatra, and Sheba. See in moonlit glimmer those middle passages bruised with pain on slave ships, in dungeons, smoldering in torrid tombs of Western industrial nightmares buried in the cotton coffins of the South. Glimpses of a memorable past. Fragments of the dimmed soul of a people of destiny to fix as an image to mirror us and our Negritude, our collective Afro based consciousness. Nobly, irrevocably, we emerged to become who we are. And we are Black, beautiful, precious, proud. Sarah Fabio: This one is called, Star Spangled: A Gloved Charge Shot Through the Olympic Air, for John Carlos and Tommie Smith 1968. Black gloved and upthrust pair of clenched fist and quick surprise on mere bowed heads and downcast eyes found their match in United. Shot forth a charge bolting through the star spangled Olympic air. And they that were on the bottom had made it to the top and the ever burning torch of fire bright light at the summit was in sight. A newfangled way for two Blacks to send a brown bombed message back to mother Africa. And worldwide [Kissen] can, "Hello Mom, I glad I win." Sarah Fabio: Oh, what's more. They let all in on the fact that we're a community of winners, a heroic race of men. Not accidental and incidental super Negros, super spades. Jack's so nimble and quick that some Neo-Nazi mandate might once more pit us on a matched race between horse and man. Salute. Salute. Salute the brothers who gave our race a charged and silent word. Black power to Black people. Those bronzed wonders with prophetic vision communicated for the world to hear, yes, yes we're winners all and victory is no individual bag. Yeah. On a clear day blessed with farsightedness, they could see from this height forever and feel a surge in confidence that tomorrow's prize is at hand, is already a reflection of yesterday's glowing sunset. Sarah Fabio: And back on the Soul side, I have one called, Boss Soul. Boss Soul is for real love, hate, doing the thing, moving, clapping, boogalooing, telling it like it is. Letting it all hang out. Learning through living what life's all about. I mean, gut bucket, gospel, spiritual, jazz touch cords of feeling any live person has to tune into or turn on to that special deep down inside you thing. And when an ax riffs sad, drums beat bold, flutes pipe mellow, trumpets wail cold, oh yeah, it makes you feel for real. In Chi' there's a wall with a background of blue with faces of Black folk painted on who gave soul a special hue. Malcolm, Marcus, Coltrane, Monk, Stokely, Sarah, Nina, Du Bois, Gwen, Muhammad Ali, Aretha, and then that little LeRoi cat. Sarah Fabio: And his words built into Obasi's wall of respect to shout from the brick front, "Black people, calling all Black people wherever you are. Urgent. Come on in." Dig it, blood. You're what's happening. You learned in your Black ma's kitchen the nits and grits of it. I mean, corn, and crackling, beans, and greens, hoe cake, Black eyes, and rice, cobblers, yams, sweet potato pies, chitlins, ribs, links, neck bones, backs, and snouts. That's just to give you a hint of what the flavors all about. Now being hip, wise, weary, but at peace even when down to a thin dime and still finger popping and grooving in time your way, catching others grooving theirs. Giving the next man his due respect, digging on everyone going into their own thing. Everybody sing, Amen. Talking about a whole lots of ever-loving soul. It's something else. It's boss. Boss soul. Sarah Fabio: There's one called, The Hurt of It All. Ain't nobody heard me singing sweet songs lately. My sweet notes soured some time ago: raped, robbed, abandoned, left rotting in some Southern swill which stayed too long in the heart of America still, turning bad. Ain't nobody heard me singing no sweet songs lately. Where have life's sweet things gone? Flowers, friends, love, tokens of love, security, beauty, hope. Nope. Nobody seems to know where or even when all those things, those dreams, those sentiments we cherished perished. Ain't nobody heard me singing sweet songs lately. They turned to ashes in the flaming waste of our great hate. Coltrane couldn't make it either. He knew Sam Cooke lied when he said, "A change is going to come." And I watched them both die before it did. Otis Redding had an inkling of this truth while sitting on the dock of the bay, both of us swaying with Aretha plumbing the depths of the Black race's soul, voicing a juju of our visions. Shaking her head sadly, she said," Ain't no way." Sarah Fabio: Martin tried to love. Tried to be a drum major for peace, but juxtaposed on his deep, resonant sound of rolling drum was the USA's shotgun blast of apartheid, shattering, blood splattering his dreams, our dreams, and those of his strong, Black, stoic mother, prophet father, four brave and beautiful youth, and the bronzed wonder of his too-soon, widowed, devoted wife, and all of us Blacks, poor in the riches of the world and spirit. Sarah Fabio: Mahalia heaved her deep bosom and dropped a tear on the rough hewn wooden bier, crying a cop-out plea, straining beyond the trials of earth and the veils of hate and scorn, reaching toward other worldness from a soul weary voice gutted with despair to say, "Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on." Where we're gonna go, Mahalia? Don't toll the bell heralding for our folk an eternity of hell in the beast's Valhalla. Where we're gonna go, Mahalia? Back to mother Africa or just back to Mother Earth? To dust as all living things must? For not here or any other place is there a chance for Black people to live in peace and in harmony with their own soulful selves. Sarah Fabio: Where we're going to, Mahalia? You tell us and don't just put us on. Not with notes of murderous discord, but with the sweet submissive sounds of suicide. If my life must be a sacrifice, let it be in the name of my own self interests and those of my strong Black sons and daughters. Ain't nobody heard me singing sweet songs lately. But maybe I will find as a last word, some sweet note to leave behind when it's said, "that's all she wrote." Sarah Fabio: Some of my students got to thinking that that was a pretty cold shot that I didn't have any sweet song. So, a fellow poet, who's also a program director of Black Studies at University of California, wrote me a poem in answer to that, saying that the sweet songs are gonna come. And to show my appreciation, I wrote him one back. And it's called, Once More the Sweet Songs for Carl Mack. Sarah Fabio: Sweet songs you said were gonna come again, my man. And didn't they? I mean, jetted in on a ray of radiance like the sun to shine on those in our midst in the still unborn in this hour of our great need. You prophesied the return of mandolins, and tambourines, and tinkling bells, triangles and cymbals, and they sided in on beans from Pharoah Sanders as I slept taking me unaware, tripping, blowing my mind. Yeah, I still hear those fun bells. Those where one bell's distant now they're near like a sound in dream. And I know soon now the sweet songs are going to pour like rain for my love torn souls one more time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right on. Right on. One more time. Right on. Sarah Fabio: Thing that I wrote when I was teaching at Merritt College where the Panthers were going to school. Bobby Seale was one of my early students in Afro-American literature in the Oakland, Berkeley area. And this poem, I published in the Black Panther paper. Freed by Any Means Necessary. The pen is a weapon. It can discharge volleys of meaning hurled toward the bullseye of truth. It can deafen the ear with a roar of a people's voice clamoring for justice. It can kill lives emitted in ink from oppresses presses making beast of holy men just divine their slaughters. Black people. Righteous man. Throw away those water pistols. What we need are stoners to riddle America's bastions of bigotry which have kept the Black man back, the poor people poor, the dispossessed and isolated estranged from the mainstream of life. The pen has always been a white weapon. It must be wrested from the press's hands by a Black power. And it must blast forth the fire of Black consciousness creating new images of our people, by our people, for our people. Sarah Fabio: The Black Panthers are the holy men of our time. They are the last practitioners of the Judeo-Christian ethic. All others have turned their priesthoods into a mafia protecting not man, but the status quo. We must free Huey and free American justice. Free LeRoi Jones and free creativity and art. Free rap and free free speech. Free Eldridge. Free our souls on ice. Free Bobby. Free love, respect, and power. Free Black Panthers. Free humanism. Free Black man. Free goodness and honor. Free way now and free us all. Sarah Fabio: As I said, I don't hesitate to be political. You know. And I certainly think that if I read the newspapers, even the two papers in our city, there are enough things to react about daily. You know? And I think that a poet should react daily. This one is for Nina Simone and it's called, Nina Giving Mr. Backlash the Blues. Sarah Fabio: Going to leave you, Mr. Backlash, with all those mean old dirty blues you laid on the backs of folk of the world: red, yellow, brown, and Black. Going to tell you where it's at so that you can't hide from the truth. And your funky gifts, we're going to give them right on back to you. War games like Vietnam, maiming and killing our youth. Raised taxes, fixed wages, second-class houses and schools, closed doors, no jobs, being treated like second-class fools. Giving you sleepless nights about that centuried-old trip with nothing but white backlash, burning salt on scars left by slavers whips. Yeah. Going to fix you a wanga stuffed with all that rot. I'm going to pull from my old voodoo bag the heaviest spell that I've got. I'm going to lay it on you till you paid your dues. But till then, Mr. Backlash, we're going to leave you with the blues. Sarah Fabio: Would you like to at this point ask me any questions about my own poetry or the subject of Black poetry since this is our last day together? Yes. Speaker 3: When did you [inaudible] time of poetry? I mean, were you influenced by someone like LeRoi Jones, [inaudible]? Sarah Fabio: Yes. Yes. I've always written a kind of poetry that is based in the reality of my experience. And I was born in a segregated society of Nashville, Tennessee that had both all of the hurt that white people could lay on Blacks and all of the beauty that Black people could have given that kind of situation. So, I always both celebrated what there was to celebrate and protested whatever there was to protest. I remember... Oh. I was sort of precocious, I suppose. I went to Spelman when I was 15. College. And graduated from Fisk University when I was 18. Sarah Fabio: And one of the earliest, probably, indications that I had that I could professionally be a poet was when I heard Margaret Walker read the first year of my college training. And she's someone who, as I said, did get her training here at University of Iowa. She came through and she had just won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in '42. Or '43. She had just won it in '42 and this was '43. And I was just back there a month ago and I found that she came through in October. And that was really one of the earliest contacts, probably, that I had, was with this woman poet who had just won acclaim. So before then, poetry was sort of a game, I suppose. You know. I was fairly young. I wrote, but that was all. I think I had once won a prize in the 8th grade for something like, I am an American. I'm proud to say it. Sarah Fabio: Yeah. I think that was one of the first poems that I wrote and won a award. I think when I was in Fisk... I have a poem in the Fisk Herald called, I Hate This, about a trip on a segregated bus [inaudible]. So, as I said, I think I have always both celebrated and protested. And I think that that's human. You know. If you step on my feet, I say, "ouch." Or I'll kick you or something. You know. If we have another kind of relationship going, I reward you in kind. I think that's a very human thing. Okay? So, in poetry... I suppose in poetry, I just try to be as much myself as I can be. Sarah Fabio: Now, there's a recent book. Houghton Mifflin has one called, Dices Or Black Bones, I think. And that has about four or five of my poems in it. Adam David Miller is the editor of that. And some of the... You'll see some poems there that I wrote about '64. When I was getting a master's in creative writing with special emphasis on poetry from San Francisco State. There, I had something like, Evil is no Black Thing. So, even then, even on my thesis, even though I used literary allusions, Melville's Moby Dick and things like this, I was concerned with America's symbolism that anything white is right and anything Black is bad. You know. Which is... Stokely Carmichael once said... He said, "America believes in all of those syllogisms like anything all Black is bad." Then he says, "Now, I am all Black. And you're not going to get me into that trick bag because, he says, because I am Black and beautiful." You see? Sarah Fabio: And that shows how sometimes so-called logic doesn't necessarily have to work. And I need to think anything all Black is all Black. Anything all white is all white. And I don't think you have to put a judgment on what is good or what is bad. And then, you'd have to look at cause and effect. How did it get to be all Black? Why? Or something like that. How did it get to be all white? And it seems to me that, of course, Black expression is a very legitimate thing where if America hadn't had an oppressive suppressive system, Black people wouldn't have had to wait 300 years after they arrived on the shore to say, "Yes, I'm Black and I'm beautiful." You know, that's the only unnatural thing about it. That one couldn't have said that as soon as he got here. Everybody else did. You know? Sarah Fabio: But then, we had to go through a whole long history where white Americans, in order to look good, had to constantly write a lot of junk about Black people's mentality, Black people's morality. And they still... Some of you out there may be out there to write a PhD master's thesis on Black people. And we've had quite a few of those. As someone said, here in Iowa City, they're about to start thinking about studying the places like Iowa City. And that might be a very real kind of thing to do, really. At this late stage, America probably would be able to learn a lot about itself by studying itself and studying why it can't let go of the racism that it has had all along. Why it can't although its rhetoric always says that it had. You know? Sarah Fabio: And you who are in school ought to really give some serious thought about that. Because if you said that there are no problems in Iowa, you should study the history of Iowa to see like where did all those Sioux Indians go? You know? Did those Blacks who came into Waterloo meet their Waterloo? You know? Every place in America has a history that it cannot be proud of. And once it knows itself it can start doing some things. But as long as it does not know itself, it assumes that it is the epitome of the great society. Sarah Fabio: Let me read one more poem then, and I'll go. Heal Our History. Black youths, painfully embittered. Put down our great society, our advanced civilization and dub it a junkyard heap tied with mass-produced, self-diminishing things skylighted by the insubstantial dream of the brotherhood of man. And it is our charge to relieve their pain, to help them to believe again that those, heretofore, unrealized concepts on which we were founded live today and bind us to a common cause. Their dark wails rise from the ghetto bowels of our great robot world and whip like lashes the sleeping American conscience opens up the 300-year-old festering sore of hate induced violence. Sarah Fabio: We human beings, are time machines and much much more. We need the courage to relive and forgive a hateful past. To balance the books of heavy deeds and then move on. Our untended wounds like gangrene bound. A skilled surgeon's sharp scalpel can cleanse away the damaged tissue to start new growth. There's no time in our jet age world for quacks and their quick cure schemes. Now, at all cost, we must heal our history. Or else, our future rots in the disease of our past. This poem is in Black Families in White America by Andrew Billingsley. With that, I'd like to say that I enjoyed being with you this week. And best to everything. Speaker 1: That was Sarah Fabio from the University of California at Berkeley with today's lecture. This series of programs is presented by the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa in cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American Studies Program at the University as material for the course, Afro-American literature. Today's program originated as a live broadcast at 1:30 PM, May 8th 1970 from Shambaugh Auditorium and was recorded for future broadcasts. This is the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa.