Funeral Diva

by Pamela Sneed

But I remember the yellow green brown walls of Bellevue and St. Vincent’s Hospital

  wards full of sick skinny gay men

  covered in lesions and purple spots like in leper colonies

  In my recent experiences with the healthcare system

  I was kept in the front offices of a doctor’s office until I explained

  I had fancy insurance

  “Oh, why didn’t you say so,” he said.

  Then I was led to a spare office in the back with a black leather couch

  He pulled out a contract and was smiling so nice

  So many times, I was sent to specialists who knew nothing

  Once I gave my mother a computer, it broke somehow

  and my dad not wanting to admit he knew nothing put the wires in

  an impossible place.

  I laughed, until I learned doctors do it, too.

  Back in the day poet Hattie Gossett used to talk about the difference between

  snow in Harlem and snow on the Upper East Side

  Whereas in Harlem it wasn’t plowed and left in icy mounds

  Turned black with soot, urine, and feces

  When I graduated college and first began my teaching career

  I worked at a literacy center in Harlem attached to a public elementary school

  It was there I saw two Americas

  Whereas like in South Africa under apartheid

  Black students were given Bantu education

  forced to speak Afrikaans

  I read a headline in a newspaper the other day that called

  an opiod epidemic in a white American town heartbreaking

  They didn’t say the word heroin until much later and it said heartbreaking

  Whereas I remember the crack epidemic in inner city Black neighborhoods

  Some of which was planted to destroy them, and the people were called thugs,

  addicts, menaces, thrown off welfare rolls

  The war on drugs which is now admittedly a code for

  the war against Black people

  Rockefeller drug laws were invented to put immense numbers of POC

  in jail for limited possession.

  They got immeasurably long sentences and it was called anything but heartbreaking.

  Given all that I have said

  What if I told you that little smiley yellow emoticons

  That all the texting and social media addicts use

  are just masks

  What if beneath them were war, savagery, rage, poverty, fear,

  jealousy, envy, people fighting and

  desperate to survive

  After Trump was elected people on the left kept claiming

  He’s stolen our democracy

  I would never dispute his evil and our world is forever changed

  But I have to ask

  Exactly what democracy is it we are speaking of?

  Is it the one of slavery and subsequent 100 years of Jim Crow?

  Is it the slaughter of Native American people

  Treaties broken like today’s voting machines in poor and Black neighborhoods?

  Is it Standing Rock where a pipeline is driven through sacred Native lands,

  People tear gassed arrested?

  Is it the recent ICE detention centers, Brown people held for seeking asylum

  and put in cages?

  The millennium started with Bush’s stolen election

  Which democracy is it we are speaking of?

  Is it the one that started relentless never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

  With thousands of casualties?

  Is it the democracy that dropped Napalm on people running

  Skin burnt off

  Is it the one where a woman was assaulted daily

  dragged across the world stage

  and her perpetrator became the leader of a supposedly free world?

  What if I said after Trump’s election

  A veil lifted

  And all we’ve lost are illusions

  I don’t know about Obama, but the only hope I have

  is in two moments—

  When he entered office, he carried a book of poetry by Derek Walcott.

  He wanted the world to see poetry’s importance.

  Three months after he entered office

  Obama boarded a plane to Ghana

  He went to and was photographed at Cape Coast Castle, the former warehouse

  Used for slaves

  There Obama stood and looked onto the Atlantic.

  He acknowledged slavery and the Middle Passage,

  That’s the hope I have.

  There in the loving defiance of Black slaves

  In the unsung

  runaways, the escapees, prisoners, martyrs

  Those who never made it out

  And in my students, the teachers, their voices, their formation,

  inspiration

  Artists shaping the world from earth and water into clay

  CIRCUS ACTS

  All rage aside

  I gotta hand it to Trump and his admin because they

  really have managed to stage the greatest heist

  and show on earth

  Like the old Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus

  used to boast trapeze and live animal acts

  before animal rights activists shut them down

  I mean, this is like the heists in Oceans 11, 12, and 13

  I could never watch because they seemed so contrived

  Yes, they have delivered something so spectacular

  it’s better than anything Karl Rove could have dreamt of

  This even outdoes the architects of apartheid that turned the entire country

  of South Africa into a jail for Black people

  All I can think of is the movie Gladiator when Joaquin Phoenix plays

  a corrupt emperor with no experience who

  achieved power illicitly

  When asked how he’d rule over the people

  he said, “Give them games”

  and every day slaves fill an arena to fight.

  This is some high-wire sawed-in-half-lady shit

  This is like some Hannah Arendt the banality of evil and

  the bureaucratization of homicide shit

  where the Holocaust was hidden in paperwork, menial tasks

  everyone had a hand in

  so no one saw the whole picture

  I mean this is some sci-fi Octavia Butler and The Hunger Games shit

  I mean nodding to Jayne Cortez’s

  poem describing the rape of Joanne Little

  Asking just what the fuck was she supposed to do

  Tongue his encrusted toilet stool lips

  Suck the numbers off his tin badge

  choke on his clap trap balls

  Squeeze the nub of his rotten maggots

  Sing god bless America thank you

  fucking my life away?

  This is some scrambling around

  too many balls in air

  can’t keep track shit

  More buttons pushed than when trapped in

  an elevator panic

  Some through the roof ratings shit

  Record-breaking Roots shit

  For pleasure, I watch the sci-fi spoof Agents of Shield

  on Netflix

  An agency of superheroes seeking justice

  One of the characters said like the real-life Mark Zuckerberg

  We no longer have to surveil people because

  they offer up their information for free.

  When alone, just to myself I secretly call Facebook/Racebook

  Can’t say it out loud to anyone because you know …

  people steal.

  One of my friends, an older white woman who took the hit

  for Abbie Hoffman

  She went to prison.

  She said, “Everything there is racialized,

  they play movies constantly that will divide and create groups.”
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  That’s what happens on Facebook.

  We are constantly fed race stories

  whipped up into frenzies

  It like a civil war every day.

  This is some deep shit shit.

  Talking to one of my students and

  they said, “Oh Trump’s so stupid,”

  I started to yell, “That’s what they want us to believe.”

  “He’s playing the character in a soap opera

  And we experience him as a character we know.”

  Years ago, I was asked to join panel for an academic discussion

  on Beyoncé

  I asked that we not consider her as a personality but as a business

  Like a marketing machine

  Every time a Hollywood celebrity wants to sell something

  these days they say something shocking with regard to race and gender.

  Singer John Mayer referred to his dick publicly as a white supremacist.

  The Seinfeld guy was filmed in a club, responding to a Black heckler

  and said something like, “You’re lucky you’re not hanging from a tree

  with a fork up your ass.”

  The Seinfeld box set was released the next day and sold millions of copies.

  The day before Madonna’s album dropped she took to Twitter

  referred to her Black son as, “My Nigga.”

  It’s all a strategy like when Jay and Bey sampled the lines

  preceding an infamous beating of Tina Turner by Ike on their album,

  It said, “Eat the cake Anna Mae,”

  referring to when Ike brutally shoved food into Tina’s mouth.

  From the beginning, you could tell Trump was running on

  a racist platform during the debates, everyone in his family

  except Melania

  died their hair platinum blonde and he made Hitleresque signals

  to depict the Aryan race.

  On the panel where I posited Bey and our reaction to her

  as a business and result of clever marketing

  there was great uproar and pushback by Black women

  soon to graduate.

  I don’t care if you like me, I said,

  but there has to be

  analysis.

  BLACK PANTHER

  I watched Black Panther

  and all I could think of was oh no

  Giving permission

  for a new crop of Black Americans

  to visit Ghana and West Africa

  Saying things like I’m home

  and giving the Wakanda salute

  Since Africa was presented as so easy

  Bite-sized McNugget friendly

  Lion King chunks

  Some Africans would welcome them

  but others would laugh

  Big lumbering dumb Americans

  Like those speaking English loud in foreign places

  Swimming naked in religious communities

  because the world is their oyster

  I was embarrassed by it

  Humbly asking someone to pardon our naïveté or privilege

  It’s not our fault we were brainwashed and estranged

  I felt protective, too

  remembering my trip to Ghana

  The castle

  Sitting at the edge of the ocean

  Bathing

  Where the ships were loaded

  Walking through those dungeons

  of unspeakable horror

  Slaves standing knee deep

  In feces and urine

  Fishing food from waste

  I wanted to protect what I saw there

  Not wanting loud Black American tourists

  with their soles walking all over the ground

  At the slavery museum in Portugal

  the guard explained to me

  Most people don’t even know what this is

  Even after we explain, he said

  Black Americans are the worst

  Come straight from the ocean

  won’t wipe their dirty feet

  ask where the whips and chains are

  because they only want gore

  I want to say there are some things the movie did well

  I held back tears when I saw the cloth

  The kente brought back memories

  of my ancestral journey

  The longing for home

  When the young man travels through a portal

  to the ancestral realm

  There was beauty

  I also knew well the storyline

  The lost orphaned African American returning to Africa

  It was my MFA thesis work

  inspired by my trip to Ghana

  And actually the scholarship didn’t belong solely

  to Ta-Nehisi Coates

  It was Sadiya Hartman who wrote the book, Lose Your Mother

  I was shocked that a superhero film

  would attempt the depth of subject

  But it quickly turned into using Africa as a backdrop for

  African American identity issues

  I was offended, too

  All I could think of was Safiya Bukhari

  a Black Panther and political prisoner

  dead at 53

  And what was done to Fred Hampton

  and Huey Newton

  I wanted to scream at the film, This isn’t a revolution

  They said with the merchandising it made billions

  A cartoon, while our education healthcare neighborhood

  are still lacking.

  I thought other things too how it descended haplessly

  into Black-on-Black war

  and the CIA agent is a good guy

  And female Black action figures

  hadn’t been seen on screen for forty years

  Since the days of blaxploitation

  And the same in literature

  Thirty years between a prominent political

  Artist lesbian

  Like Audre Lorde

  So actually, where’s the progress?

  MASK

  I knew and I wrote years ago

  that the entire sci-fi genre had changed

  when at the end of one of the Planet of the Apes sagas

  Caesar the talking ape responds to his white owner who infantilized him

  On Caesar’s rise to the throne

  he says, Come home Caesar

  Caesar responds of earth and America,

  I am home

  I knew that was a nod to the Obama age,

  the first Black man in the White House

  But it tipped the genre on its head

  when every alien before and after says they want to return home

  and Caesar says defiantly,

  I am home

  No longer a native son

  no longer the space alien or stolen African

  In my MFA thesis work long before the new Apes movie

  I placed the character of Caesar at the mouth of Cape Coast Castle

  following a trail of body parts spread across the Atlantic

  trying to find his people

  For Caesar to say you must acknowledge us

  Another seminal moment was when Robert Downey, Jr. said

  to a shocked audience, I am Iron Man

  That was the end of the masked Superhero

  A secret identity people would risk their lives to hide and discover

  I remember feeling uncomfortable not knowing how Marvel would resolve

  something we’d been so accustomed to

  But I also knew and it’s something I write often, how after 9/11

  All Hollywood endings changed

  In the film Ladder 49 actor Joaquin Phoenix who plays a firefighter

  doesn’t emerge from the flames and it’s devastating

  Something you might have only witnessed in some dystopian sci-fi

  I’ve been watching the TV show Black Lightning

  A Black comic-book hero
who’s

  trying to save a disenfranchised devastated Black community like Flint

  or any urban ghetto anywhere that’s been experimented upon

  Drug ravaged whom the city wants to control

  The only hope is Black Lightning

  who is also a high school principal trying

  to uplift the race

  It’s corny as hell

  with low production values

  And the evil man is so sadistic

  it makes me wince

  But the show gets interesting with Black Lightning’s

  two daughters who are also said to possess powers

  the eldest teen is a lesbian

  With lots of girl-on-girl action

  The story gets interesting about ten episodes in

  when his best friend the police chief

  figures out who Lightning is and confronts him

  I mean it should have been so obvious early on

  It was ridiculous they didn’t know

  But I wasn’t ready at all

  when Black Lightning unmasked himself

  His face naked before his friend

  I felt his vulnerability

  Raw powerlessness of being seen

  Face wind eyes exposed

  maybe it’s because we’ve always cloaked ourselves

  historically

  Made friends with night fall

  Dawoud Bey showing the Underground Railroad at night

  Utter blackness silver purple

  Blue hue shades

  DuBois Dunbar

  A Black student reciting “We Wear the Mask”

  Contemporary times teach you to hate

  fear the woods and nature

  The setting for horror

  But for Black people

  it is freedom

  Maybe that’s why I winced

  when he lifted his mask

  Feeling both breath

  and danger.

  PROPHECY

  Having been to Ghana twice, in 2005 and 2006,

  the first time for almost a month and the second for two weeks,

  a third time I traveled to South Africa in 2011

  I could never call myself an expert on Africa, nor want to.

  I can say that those trips changed my life forever, in mostly positive ways.

  Based on those trips to Ghana and South Africa, I was able to predict

  this moment in America where we would be obsessed with all things African

  in art and film and culture.

  I know when I saw the swirl of brown faces in Accra, experienced the bustling city

  the stalls and stalls of vendors in Makola Market in Accra

  and in Kumasi

  and cell phones everywhere

  I knew I was seeing gems of a hidden world/

  with expanses of land, people, and innovation.

  All I could say when I returned, as some white American tech giants