Black Libraries Matter: No Whispering. Food, Drink, & Dancing, Shouting, & Singing Encouraged

I've spent the past couple of weeks going to sleep at dawn after long dejected discussions with black friends and loved ones, wherein the culmination was either rallying around the fact that we need to defend ourselves or a list of safe places to abscond to when all black people in the U.S. become refugees. Loops of inevitability, predictions of only the impossible happening.

Normally I'm up all night writing poems, essays, generating soundpieces, and the man I love is up making music, listening for loops of the ecstatic; we discuss jazz albums and senseless memes about black joy or sorrow unmasked. But this July we are up talking war strategy, cosmic counterterrorism. America is at war with Blackness and with all otherness at that. Everything other than the lie America is built on and can't even keep straight. We heard about the first bomb robot used on U.S. soil, detonated on a black former soldier trained by the U.S. military after he came home and aimed his weapons at the white cops he blamed for killing his brothers, instead of at the aimless brown bodies abroad. Murderer. Martyr. More like him surfaced, perplexed mercenaries seeking clarity through retaliation. Do we blame them? Or do we blame a government that groomed them to kill in its defense.

We heard of more police who had murdered black people, dismissed with no charges, some of the perpetrators made into millionaires by the white media paying them to speak on just how they managed to gun down another black body in the street free of tangible consequence. My obsession with the 1960s was replaced by a fixation on the demented present and the ways we can save it from itself.
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For years I've been collecting archives of black poetry, poetics, and jazz, and especially examples of the powerful force created when the three coalesce. Listening to these recordings reminds me that there are places in the language that words cannot reach. There are zones of action that mean as much to poetry and all of literature as the language itself does. Ways of being in the world that the poem can see, grab, even exploit to access its tonal intention. I bring this up because as black artists seeking the luxury of abstraction, or just simply needing to get work done, we are instead up all night deciding what we should do in order to survive this country; simple acts like record keeping or stepping up to bring clean water and healthy food to black activists gain a surreal and healing register.

We become larger than our actual selves, less distracted. The clear and present dangers of the false doctrine that is white supremacy ignite in us and even more intimate understanding of how to articulate ourselves. We are forced to assess our natural black, brown, and beige selves in times of crisis, the parts that we can edit away when things are normal and we are just America’s favorite fetish objects safe in commodity land. In our work and in our daily lives, our language grows richer and more relevant when we rise to the occasion, acknowledge being under siege, and ask ourselves what we really need to get over. As the benevolently selfish and language-obsessed introverts that many writers are, this is some nuance of relief. But then what actions should we take, what is authentic, what is relevant, what is useful, what is beautiful, what is true? What is supportive without being contrived, what are writers qualified to offer right now besides all that we have?

So this is foremost a call for donations of books to the small townships of activists forming and occupying government buildings and demanding justice.  To Snoop and the Game openly calling on hoods, gangs, and sets to cross enemy lines and meet at church on Sunday and develop a masterplan, to break ties with the slave plans of the past. To Jasmine Abdullah inspiring and ongoing occupation of Los Angeles City Hall. When participants arrive, may they be greeted with a growing library of revolutionary and beautiful texts and music. Please consider a couple of books or other documents that woke you up or saved you from certain delusion and consider contributing them, for Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Philando Castille, Trayvon Martin, Redel Jones, Micah Johnson, Alton Sterling, Wakisha Wilson, Emmett Till, Troy Davis, Eric Garner, and the countless others murdered or corrupted by the state and its trainees. The least we can do is offer the tools we have, the ones that have healed and helped us along.

Occupy Wall Street had a library. The Black Lives Matter occupiers and organizes and even black people on the sidelines crying and losing sleep, deserve the same efforts. The plan is to let this evolve into a venue for planning and performance based in Los Angeles, and then to expand the effort to create libraries/satellites in other cities. By building and housing archives outside of the normative university setting, we give our research and collective action a chance to expand beyond the bureaucracy and propriety of those institutions, a concrete expansion on what I've been doing with Afrosonics, because our literature and music, all of our art, can be the capital that carves out physical space for our movements, when our bodies themselves are under attack and displaced.

In addition I'd like to use the Afrosonics/Mythscience platform to form a think tank comprised of black writers, as well as a revolutionary book club to base our contemplation and coalition building around. The first cycle of the book club will begin this August with Amiri Baraka’s Home: Social Essays, email contact below. Black stories matter, and this historical moment demands that we have the strength to tell them, the glories and the horror stories even as they are occurring, so that we can extend our solidarity beyond the abstract and maybe even get some sleep.

Contact if interested : [email protected] and donate any books to: Poetic Research Bureau Attn: Harmony Holiday, 951 Chung King Rd, Los Angeles, CA 90012.

With love and mise-en-scène, Harmony