1.
I’m the next coming to suffering, but I remember my birth
When I first brought pain to the table as an offering to my people
It was accepted and passed down; I give it rhythm … .
The horn played the time my wife left, when Daniel died,
when Nigger was a noun and boy was my last name.
2.
Lives are expensive
It cost me power to take one
with no promises but a come around
All my ends never filled the hole
3.
May power respect my ritual
May my body have head to see the villain at my table
May it affect me
May we agree
May it be true that if I hurt you, then I meant it
May apologies reach my right side before my left hand
May instructions hold me till my word works and my face is enough
May I love this when I meet me
Hope we still cool
Decade of Fire is a remarkable tale of the Bronx’s rise from ash, standing to set the record straight about the fires that ravaged the borough in the late ’60s and ’70s.
A 1971 photograph by Jan van Raay shows artist Cliff Joseph leading a group of artist-activists—members of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC)—in the dead of winter protesting the Whitney Museum’s controversial exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America (months before its opening on April 7, 1971).
“I can’t distill it all,” Evie Shockley confesses in her contribution to this vital and multifarious print offshoot of Claudia Rankine’s online Open Letter Project.
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Tim Roth, Amy Hempel, Emmylou Harris, Matthew Ritchie, Wallace Shawn, Christian Wolff, Gilles Peress, Kendall Thomas, and George Walker.
Work that is just about the technical or conceptual, personal or political, is fine; it meets the world with what’s in fashion. But there’s something else bordering on magic, that brings an artwork home, makes it land and resonate. You can’t really teach that so much as conjure it.
Kara Walker
