Firespitter: On Jayne Cortez

Who was she? She had taken her grandmother’s maiden name, Cortez, an identification with her matriarchal lineage. In her mouth, a resisting woman morphs into the land: Africa, the Caribbean, the Carolinas. Unlike the white male Hernán Cortés, who brought the name from Spain to the Americas in the sixteenth century, who came to extract, plunder, pillage, and conquer, this Cortez, Jayne, set out to communicate, confront, and connect with a Black, brown, revolutionary, and creative diasporic world. And in doing so she became a transnational, intercontinental, galactic chronicler and creator of Black experience. Gwendolyn Brooks called her a “Black Nation song.”

I read her poems over and over, the incredible rhythms of the poems springing to life as I took the words off the page and spoke them aloud. She broke her lines as we were broken, separating subject from its object as we were separated from a continent, immersing us in a hallucinatory surrealism that told the truth of our existence.

A generation of spoken word artists who came after Jayne Cortez were influenced by her collaborations with avant-garde jazz musicians. And that generation who followed her and hit the stage and “took the mic” also noted that she had founded a publishing company, Bola Press, assuring that her “spoken words” didn’t disappear when she stepped off the stage.

                Store that
              contaminated
            fetus
          of dioxin in
        the womb
      line those lungs
    with the snowflakes
  of asbestos
—From “Plain Truth”

_____

I remember the first time I saw her, the Firespitter. I had read the work and was expecting a large, imposing presence in “traditional” dress. I mean, what does a Black female warrior look like? This warrior, who cleaved and cracked language into surreal shards to deliver it more wholly, turned out to be a petite woman in a dark green silk dress with a Kente cloth belt and designer ballet flats.

I associate the early poems with the stages/microphones of West Village clubs where I first heard her. Where I heard McCoy Tyner, Ntozake Shange, Brian Jackson. And Gil Scott-Heron—“Say, what’s the word? Johannesburg!” With minimal mainstream media coverage of revolutionary struggles, our poets were a kind of Twitter spreading the word faster than the powers that be could erase it. Black consciousness and female consciousness crackled through the air like lightning.

For Cortez, poetry was not about mastery of form. Poetry in the mouth of the Firespitter was the creation of form—the form necessary to hide behind a tree in a Louisiana swamp and watch a Black man’s testicles severed as he swung from a tree. She created a form to cull language from the broken neck of the dead-speak of the evening news so that she could reveal to us the disturbed scintillations of fresh black blood glistening and dripping down the pant leg of our own annihilation. Cortez assaulted the line. She disallowed its being used as a vehicle for entertainment. The Firespitter took the language they had used to lynch us and gave us the tongue of the wolf, the pink penis of a howling lizard, and the liquid from a leopard’s eyeball to take us beyond capitalism’s rotting green testicles. She mirrored a deep Blackness that had little to do with color and everything to do with being a diasporic Black descendant of slaves brought to America in a nefarious and unsentimental transfer of flesh by one race to another, where she/we became Cortezes, Loftons, Pinkies, Beulahs, Bakers, Freemans, who left blue-black skin, fufu, and an old slave status for a new slave status when we emerged from the belly of a filthy toilet-smelling ship that had started out in Liverpool.

This Middle Passage connected us and separated us—who we were, what we had endured, how we had succumbed, carried on in spite, despite, and because of it. She named us. She named the way Baby Laurence slid across the floor, the way the trumpet slit Fats Navarro’s lips. “Take us to see Muddy Waters,” the Beatles said when they arrived from the major slave port of Liverpool. The news reporters at the airport asked, “Where’s that?” The white boys from Liverpool replied, “Don’t you know who your own famous people are?”

Jayne knew who our own famous people were. They were us. The ones transported on slave ships from Liverpool and dropped off like UPS packages in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Panama, South Carolina, New York. They were the diamond embedded in the diasporic tooth that made men and women of the silenced drum beat and wail: A Love Supreme. A Love Supreme. Africa. Nagasaki. Cuba. Trench Town.

Fire is dangerous. Fire burns, destroys, cooks, transforms, illuminates.Firespitter does not play it safe. Firespitter says Palestine, thinks about

the concentration camps full of sad Palestinians

as she writes in “For the Brave Young Students in Soweto.” She tells them she sees them, that this will not last. She cracks apart the bones of apartheid with her lion’s teeth, ferociously calling out apartheid and sliding like a razor into Israel. Firespitter is seeing the future rise up in blood and recycled hate. Firespitter travels the vast lands of Africa, the Caribbean white beaches eaten by billionaires shitting black oil onto birds and blue water and people who were never more than things to be transferred to Bantustans, to Indian Reservations, to ghettos, to Gaza, to the hills, and then down from the hill when the sea starts to rise.

_____

Jayne called, we came, and the Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA) was born!

Black women writers from around the globe have been struggling against poverty, racism, exploitation, gender oppression, censorship, and other human rights violations. What we want is to participate in global decisions.
—From Jayne Cortez’s “Statement of Welcome” at OWWA’s second Yari Yari conference

We came for Jayne. Maya Angelou came. Maryse Condé came. Rashidah Ismaili came. Edwidge Danticat came. Nancy Morejón came. Rosamond S. King came. Set against each other for centuries by region, color, and academic affiliation, we came. We came against slavery, indenture, being hung out of a nineteenth-floor window by our jailor, we came against being held down and having our clitoris, labia minora, and labia majora excised and our genital openings sewn together or closed with thorns. OWWA came together against mulatta-ism, quadroon-ism, octoroon-ism, one-sixteenth-troon-ism, one thirty-second-troon-ism. We came together to keep from being operated on without anesthesia by the father of gynecology, J. Marion Sims. We came together to keep Sally Hemings from being erased. We came to laud Carmen McRae and ask Big Mama Thornton to sing the blues and take the chains off Billie’s hospital bed. We came together because we knew they were planning to end affirmative action and anything else we’d worked for.

I thought she was a genius. I asked her, “Why are you spending time organizing when you could be doing your own work?” “I do it because I can,” she said. “And because so many are not able to do it.” She was refuting a Western individualism I had not yet come to question. Her actions were saying that collective effort and self-sacrifice outshone individualism any day of the week. The next call I get is not from the Firespitter, it’s about the Firespitter. It’s urgent.

_____

Al Loving wrapped his body in one hundred painted canvas strips &
                                              set off for the egungun festival
John Hicks packed up his piano keys and
took the greyhound bus back to St. Louis
Hilton Ruiz entered the other world like a newborn baby
Alberto Chissano left Maputo wearing
...................................................
Alice Coltrane hurried off to reminisce with
                                              John about ascensions
....................................................................
Pedro Pietri put on his applejack cap
& tuxedo t-shirt
then sailed off in an antique telephone booth
to have an extended conversation
—From “States of Motion 2”

When I get to the hospital I say, “I’m here to see Jayne Cortez, fourth floor, room—”

“Fourth floor, are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Fourth floor is hospice.”

Oh no! The Firespitter is flying home!

It is on us now. To rearrange and transform the trauma stuck in the amygdala. It is on us, cuffed in the back of a police cruiser; it is on us, kicked out of our parents’ house; it is on us, intubated and falling into darkness through the invisible net at the safety-net hospital; it is on us, bleeding out like Biko in a holding cell; it is on us, anonymous backroom girls with ice picks up our vaginas. It is on us to continue through the smashed glasses of our lost vision until

            everything
in this world changes
—From “For the Brave Young Students in Soweto”

and we fly home ourselves to join her and the brave young students of Soweto.