Afaa Michael Weaver. The Plum Flower Dance. While I have my favorite poets and follow them collection by collection, on rare occasions they have nothing new published when I am hungry for the poet, or someone simply appears in my peripheral vision with an asthetic that draws me in to explore. Such was Afaa Michael Weaver’s collection of poems published from 1985-2005. How he has eluded me I am unsure, but I do have some suspicions.

I have been struck a number of times in recent weeks at individuals being unnerved by the unspoken being spoken. It does have to do with breaking silence, but it is a silence between communities which is not held within communities. In the case of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his church on Chicago’s South Side the point is that the critique of race, U.S. policy, the issues of the marginalized and impoverished have not been ignored, they have been spoken. But much of the rest of the country has been deaf, purposefully deaf to that voice for a long time and would prefer to remain innocent of such sentiments an critique.

[I have heard similar concerns from some Iranian Americans who would prefer that there were no lifting up of the neoconservative calls to attack Iran; as if unacknowledged the threat would be less likely, rather than more.]

Weaver’s poem “Sears Roebuck” addresses the question quite powerfully for me.

Mama used the telephone to change her voice.
When she ordered something
from Sears, she got proper,
proper and strange sounding.
It wasn’t like Mama to be so fancy
‘cause she wasn’t that way
around us. I just knew
she was talking to a white person
‘cause she did the same thing
when the insurance man came.
She was like an actress,
figuring in her head this woman
she had to be for a few minutes.
I guess she did it right ‘cause
she took care of all her business.
Except it didn’t seem right to me,
to be more than one way.
Mama loved telephones, and
I grew up and found out most women
love telephones and talking.
Most men don’t have much to say,
unless they just bragging and lying.
Even then black men don’t change
as much as women do most times.
Daddy didn’t carry on on the phone
like Mama did. Matter of fact,
he didn’t have much to say noway.
He just sat around and read the paper,
but Mama would get on the line
and go through a million changes.
Still the one that bothered me most
was changing up for white folk.
I didn’t understand this English,
where it came from, where it could go,
or how Mama taught me translation.
p. 42