I fell

I fell in love

So, this week I just decided to focus in on one piece for the bog since we get to go over the whole kit and caboodle in class. And, I fell in love with Paul Beatty's At Ease. I want to eat this poem up! It's tasty, fun, smart, surprisingly rich, and served up with supreme presentation. I sound like a food critic. It reminds me of the Spike Lee film Bamboozeled with the Sambo reference and line" I genesee on tap dancin hambone poet" I was just about to whip out the old dictionary and look up genesee, when I realized, Hello he is speaking in slang. That whole line conjures up the dilemma of loving what who do tap dance, write, sing the blues and being explotied for it. So I fell in love and then I fell asleep after moving by myself for 27 hours straight and yes there are only 24 hours in a day but I didn't want my boy to wake up surrounded by boxes.

But I am glad it is late because I appreciated it even more after
I called the owner of a
snow white kitty named
Cracker
it kept following me
I re-read on the bus
while a schizophrenic
black man was saying
and the white man
and the white man
and the white man
and yes I took a shower
and washed my hair
but I am going to San Quentin
San Quentin...

So who did he write this for? People like me that say things like I want to eat it up. After reading the lines:
“eatin up my people
then purging their regurgitated words
on the page”
The irony in life.
Ouch! So glad I had the chance to go back. I was boppin along and I just about missed it. I like this poem about the appropriation of Black culture because I hate that it is happening and I hate that I participate like I have been conditioned to. I think the over riding theme for Beatty is that he too, Hates that appropriation is happening and he assimilates like he has been conditioned to as well. He goes to the beatniks and then to, “A retrospective a Scatological Abstraction.”
He take s these engrained quotes and works on you, Popeye, Carly Simon (who is half black), “be bob”, my fave “ don’t smoke Buddha…” , “ einey meany miney moe” what we been conditioned to do finish the phrase before calculating the cost. Super man imagery italicized voice him? What he really thinks. “no it’s a…” fabulous line. This whole section I understand the effort to prevent skin cancer” He understands the need for people to protect themselves from
guilt and acknowledgement. “a spray on deodorant against the stench of isms.” Ouch! AHHHHH you can’t heal it until you know it there, and you can’t see it when you are to busy trying to cover it up.
The cadence and reference to war: He is saying there is a race war no matter how you dress it up.
No matter that the 1 black student in a Seattle college class called Rap to Rhetoric defends his white friend the one that wears his pant falling down and says, “ I am not racist my best friends have been black. I grew up in the CD.” That student didn’t want to be the “ angry guy”

Beatty mocks the white poets “for fun”, “real people”, “Who seem so life like”
I want to go on and on but I could take this poem line for line and spend weeks discovering what Beatty is doing, what the world is doing, what I am doing and I want to grow past the conditioned response so my actions and speech match what is in my heart. But, I have another paper to write comparing slave narratives. So I have to go. I hope we explore this piece more in class. But if not it is a keeper that I need to re-read again and again to remind myself, the war is not over and my enemy is ignorance, self protection, media, and a life time of conditioning.
Suki