Celebrating my 91st Birthday
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, July 9-15, 2006
On June 27 I turned 91.
In the morning Deepa Fernandes called from WBAI in New York to wish me
a Happy Birthday and chat with me briefly on the air.
In the afternoon I learned in an email from China that a professor is
translating Living for Change for publication.
In the evening a birthday dinner at the Boggs Center, hosted by the
Detroit Summer Collective, included a fabulous chocolate cake and out
of-town guests from the historic Allied Media Conference in Bowling
Green, Ohio.
Afterwards, at Beans &Bytes in the Cultural Center, I witnessed a
soul-stirring performance by Alixa and Naimi, the
“Heart-Beat-Soul-Sister-Artist-Warrior climbing poeTree duo who are on
a mission to reshape the world though evolutionary art that speaks
Truth to Power, employing poetry as their weapon, their medicine, their
voice and their vision.”
Among the young people gathered at Beans & Bytes I sensed a new
revolutionary/evolutionary movement emerging. They seem to me to have
learned the great lesson of the Black Power struggles of the 60s: that
militancy and mobilization are not enough to build a 21st century
movement. We need to go beyond rebellion.. We/they need to create
new truths, new language,
They are using their art to expose injustice, heal from violence, and
generate vision to help us all imagine a more just and compassionate
world. Their goal is Transformation, not reforms. As Starhawk put it
after 9/11: Only Poetry Can address Grief.
These young people are very different from the Tavis Smileys and
Michael Dysons who are so much in the public eye. They are not
struggling to "close the gap" with white America or pleading for the
return of the Welfare State. They have come of age in an America that
is morally, politically, economically and ecologically bankrupt. They
feel the pain of standing by helplessly while their brothers and
sisters, thrown on the scrapheap by our Hi-Tech economy, drift into
lives of violence, addiction and incarceration.
From Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: History of the Hip Hop
Generation, I have been acquiring a more grounded understanding of
how Hip Hop began with young people in the South Bronx who,
abandoned by the system and warred on by the authorities, refused to
become expendable and instead created a new art form to strike out
against their generation’s invisibility and expendability.
I’m also learning a lot from one-on-one conversations with Hip Hop
activists. In the Campaign Against Violence, for example,
Milwaukee-based Biko uses poetry to give young people an outlet for
the often-suppressed anger, fear, shame and resentment that come with
living around violence, so that they can remove themselves from the
boxes in which they are enclosed by society and begin the healing
process.
The morning after my birthday I spent a couple of hours with Mark, a
Latino poet who decided to become a teacher because he recognized the
unique power of schools. Schools, he says, can reproduce society by
encouraging ghetto youth to abandon their communities. Or they can
engage young people in transforming their communities and themselves.
Education in our schools today is classroom management, getting
young people to act in a certain way. Children are seen as a tabula
rasa. The teacher’s job is to instill in them certain behavior and
information so that they will become cogs in the economic system.
Actually children come to school with their own experiences, their own
knowledge. They already have their reality. It is in their culture,
their experiences, their language. Hip Hop is so powerful because it
comes out of this reality. But we still want to bring them up to our
view of what they should become, what we conceive of as a higher level
of being. We want to define, determine what they are going to be.
Teachers need to help students create their own education out of this
reality. Education is not about taking students to a certain place
that has been designated for them. It is about helping them to define,
determine their own reality.
Mark’s ideas were so close to those advocated by MLK for young people
“in our dying cities” that I could hardly believe my ears.
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