You Have the Rite
I’m raising both my arms like an alleluia, thinking of Michael Brown…
It’s been five years since Ferguson caught flame. The ensuing seasons have throttled between record Summer heat and an ominous imminent Winter. White supremacy is hot in these streets. Democracy is a slow dance between the Central Park 5 and the 45th president.
I’ve started to make a series of poems from the perspective of a teenage father’s body cam. They capture a justice system that refuses to affirm the value of Black life and a cultural system that self-restricts our ability to see Black people as free and loving beings. The poems are a lens on a psychology of self-hate and a climate of terror. The first of these, a piece called ‘You Have the Rite’, was filmed earlier this year in Vancouver and has been released on TED, almost five years to the day of Michael Brown’s murder. These poems are basic questions about ‘how’ we perform fatherhood in America.
So let’s take another American father…like…Mitch McConnell for instance…
We’re both dads. Do we want the same thing for our kids? I imagine we both work towards the safety of our children’s bodies and the security of their right to dream above their station. We want the protection of their right to imagine themselves as fully loving and enfranchised citizens of their nation of birth. Can you imagine calling for that security and be derided as anti-American? Mitch, can you imagine calling for the safety of all people…to call for a simple affirmation in the matter of life and to be threatened with death because of it?
As Americans, what is required of us to keep Black children safe?
Put another way, if I take everything that I Iove about being Black and everything that I love about being an American, are those things in and of themselves in a right and loving relationship?
‘You Have the Rite’ is among a suite of poems I premiered at Carnegie Hall earlier this year in a performance with composer Daniel Bernard Roumain. The full evening, called “The Just and Blind” also features the dancer Drew Dollaz and will be performed in the coming months at the Kennedy Center, Dartmouth, and SFJazz among other sites. In addition to the theater piece, YAK Films and Sozo Artists are releasing a series of short films that echo the themes of the work. The pieces are aligned by the same forces…a desire to love self, son, and country when at least ONE of these is loathe to reciprocate.
I pray for this country, and the sons of its anarchy. I pray they might be secure in their gender without feeling the pull of masculine performance. I pray my son might be secure in his race without succumbing to the safe(r) protection of his self-erasure. Might he experience a safety Michael Brown never did, the nostalgia of freedom this country evokes. May he live past the spectre of having to become a ‘man’ sooner than his American peers…may he raise his arms up like an alleluia and take in the freedom of his youth.
WATCH You Have the Rite on TED
ATTEND the Kennedy Center performance of The Just and The Blind
Now screening in film festivals across the US: ABOUT FACE
