Volume 52, Issue 2
LET’S VENTURE to vary an old saw. It may well be that only those who know their history are capable of repeating it. No more than any of you, of course, did we see foresee the staggering events still ongoing in North Africa and the Middle East. From the outside, we invariably fail to imagine what history does not. Not even on that memorable afternoon in Amherst, November 19, 2010, when—in celebration of forty years of revolutionary scholarship from the University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studios (est. 1970) and to commemorate fifty years of revolutionary struggle since the founding in 1960 of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committe—three seminal participants in the revolution came together in order to share their memories and instruct us all, not even then was it conceivable that the inspiring history they spoke of would in less than a month’s time ignite again in Tunisia and burn through North Africa and the Middle East. Who were the members of SNCC? According to Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, they were “young people who would jeopardize their education and place their lives at risk in the interest of justice and fairness and decency, and who performed in that way with such consummate creativity as to be able to significantly transform the history of that time.” Do tell—and tell us what in these words is not applicable today to the youth of Tunisia, of Egypt, and beyond? As the cantautore Francesco De Gregori puts it,
la storia non si ferma davvero davanti a un portone,
la storia entra dentro le stanze, le brucia,
las storia dà torto e dà ragione.
history never really stops before the main door
it comes inside the rooms, it burns them
history decides wrong, and right
(my translation)
The Massachusetts Review proudly reprints here the talks by SNCC members Thelwell, Charles Cobb, and Judy Richardson and shares in their celebration and commemoration.
Elsewhere in this issue, our history follows similarly inventive twists and turns. Thanks to John Emil Vincent, we bring you a series of unpublished poems from Jack Spicer—the San Franciscan’s transmigratory homage to Abner Doubleday. Elizabeth Hoover retraces the trail of colonial arrogance and power, and Charles Lamar Phillips ives us a chilling resurrection of McCarthyist fervor. Elsewhere, Urban Waite spins a reductio ad absurdum tale of Texas Tea partying, and Stacey Waite reminds us of our inner primate lives. And since no one can refuse refuse, we;ve also invited Vicky Spelman in to talk some trash. And that’s just a short list, with plenty of treasure still sitting on the sidewalk.
The Review also enthusiastically welcomes Aracelis Girmay to our masthead, as a Contributing Editor; in this issue, Aracelis introduces Samantha Thornhill to our readers, and reminds us what it means to speak truly—as Roland Barthes liked to say—de son corps.
Your summer reading, to sum it up, is contained within a pair of geopolitical bookends—with plenty of room for meditation, and for manoeuvre, in between. We move to a close through a pair of essays by Herbert Bix and Jon Western, two scholars who demand we think long and hard about our role in all of this.
And then, finally, jubilation. A communiqué from Egypt’s Liberation Square on the brilliant night of February 11, 2011: drafted by flashlight on cardboard in a tent, written by a coalition of representatives from five leading youth groups, sent out to the world on Facebook and Twitter, and witnessed by MR Contributing Editor Charles M. Sennott. Surrounded by Abrams tanks, these long-suffering victims of a militarized dictatorship, these unarmed yet unstoppable kids actually managed to turn an army—at least for an instant—into the face of a free nation. In his Frontline special, Charlie comments that the Egyptian revolution was the single most exciting story he’d ever covered, in all his twenty-five years of reporting. “[A] feeling shared by a lot of veteran Middle East correspondents,” he adds. “We’ve spent years covering war, insurgency, corruption, and terrorism, and we’ve all waited for the moment when the people who live under the Arab world’s corrupt, despotic reimes might rise up and rewrite their own history.” Now then, we think to ourselves, who wouldn’t like to bring that story home?
To be continued…
Jim Hicks
for the editors
Table of Contents
SNCC, the Struggle, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Department: An Introduction for Charles E. Cobb Jr., and Judy Richardson, by Ekwueme Michael Thelwell Black in Different Colors, an essay by Charles E. Cobb, Jr. Womanpower and SNCC, an essay by Judy Richardson Por Bem, a poem by Elizabeth Hoover The Fates, a poem by Maxine Scates Upon Hearing a Child Call You Old, a poem by Samantha Thornhill Estranged, a story by Charles Lamar Phillips 1 Corinthians 13, a poem by Spenser Reece Before Bees, a poem by Marina Hope Wilson Shift, a poem by Aubrey Lenahan Litany: Four Men, a story by Christine Sneed For Major General Abner Doubleday, poems by Jack Spicer Banana, an essay by Eleanor Stanford Mí Encanta Panama, a story by Robert Kostuck The Virgin of Candelaria, a story by Ruth Taylor Borges, Blind, Gives, a poem by Elena Karina Byrne Prosthesis, or The Metamorphosis, a story by Vittorio Marchis, translated by Jim Hicks Once Upon a Time, a King …, a story by Vittorio Marchis, translated by Jim Hicks The Republic of Curtis, a story by Urban Waite Grozny, a story by David Torres, translated by Daniel Navarez House Afire, a poem by Dennis Finnell How to Survive on Canned Peaches, an essay by Nicole Walker Combing Through the Trash: Philosophy Goes Rummaging, an essay by Elizabeth V. Spelman Motherhood, a poem by Adrian Blevins The Monkeys, a poem by Stacey Waite The North African–Middle East Uprisings from Tunisia to Libya, an essay by Herbert P. Bix Protecting States or Protecting Civilians: The Case for R2P, an essay by Jon Western A New Egypt, a declaration by The Youth Coalition of the Egyptian Anger Revolt
Contributors
Herbert P. Bix, Professor of History and Sociology at Binghamton University–SUNY, is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and holds an MA and Ph.D. from Harvard the University. He is the author of Peasant Protest in Japan, 1590 –1884 (Yale University Press, 1992) and Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (HarperCollins, 2000), which in 2001 won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. He is currently working on a study of war crimes.
Adrian Blevins’s The Brass Girl Brouhaha won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Blevins is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, a Bright Hill Press Chapbook Award for The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction, and, more recently, a Cohen Award from Ploughshares. A new book, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, was published by Wesleyan in 2009. Blevins directs the Program in Creative Writing at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Former Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, Elena Karina Byrne is an editor, Poetry Consultant/Moderator for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Literary Programs Director for the Ruskin Art Club, and new Executive Director of AVK Arts. Publications include Pushcart Prize XXXIII 2009, Best American Poetry 2005, Yale Review, Paris Review, APR, TriQuarterly, Denver Quarterly, and the Kenyon Review. Her books include The Flammable Bird (Zoo Press/Tupelo Press, 2002), MASQUE (Tupelo Press, 2008), the forthcoming Burnt Violin (Tupelo Press, 2012), and Voyeur Hour: Poetry, Art and the Sweet Consequence of Insignificance (essays, Tupelo Press, 2012).
Award-winning journalist Charles E. Cobb, Jr., is senior analyst for allAfrica.com, the world’s largest electronic provider of news and information about Africa. He is also a visiting professor at Brown University where every spring he conducts an undergraduate seminar titled The Organizing Tradition of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. From 1962–67, he worked as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Mississippi Delta. His journalism career includes working for NPR as a foreign affairs reporter and as a reporter/writer for the PBS documentary series Frontline. From 1985–1997, Cobb was a member of the Editorial Staff of National Geographic magazine — the first black writer to become one of that magazine’s staff writers. He was a founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists. His latest book is On the Road to Freedom, a Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail. On July 24, 2008, the National Association of Black Journalists honored Cobb’s work by inducting him into their Hall of Fame.
Dennis Finnell’s last book of poems was The Gauguin Answer Sheet (Georgia). His first book, Red Cottage, won the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press. He lives in western Massachusetts.
Elizabeth Hoover is a poet, critic, and journalist. She has contributed poetry reviews and author interviews to such publications as the Paris Review, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Morning News. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Natural Bridge, and the Café Review, among others. She received a combined MFA/ MA from Indiana University and is currently working on a biography of Robert Hayden. She lives in Pittsburgh.
Robert Kostuck is an M.Ed. graduate from Northern Arizona University. Recently published or forthcoming work appears in the Massachusetts Review, So To Speak: A Journal of Feminist Literature and Art, Alimentum: The Literature of Food, Crab Creek Review, Event, the Southwest Review, Flyway: A Literary Review, and Tiny Lights. His body is in Florida but his spirit is in the American Southwest.
Aubrey Lenahan received her MFA from George Mason University, where she was a Poetry Fellow and taught literature and composition courses. Winner of the Mark Craver Poetry Award, she is Community Outreach Director for the Washington, D.C. book festival, Fall for the Book, and translates contemporary Estonian poetry. Recent work is forthcoming in the Greensboro Review and elsewhere.
Vittorio Marchis is Professor of the History of Technology at the Politecnico di Torino. He is the author of nine books and over five hundred essays, on subjects ranging from system modeling in aerospace technology to the impact of technological innovation on contemporary society and its institutions. Notable among his recent publications is his Autopsy of a Vacuum Cleaner, a short philosophical play which he performed in 2010 at Smith College. He is also the Director of the Historical Documentation Center and Museum of the Politecnico di Torino.
Daniel Nevarez was born in the Bronx, New York, and raised in Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico. He obtained an MA in English Literature at the University of Puerto Rico–Rio Piedras. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Author or coauthor of more than a dozen works of history, biography, and trade reference, Charles Lamar Phillips has been an editor and writer at Congressional Quarterly and the Washington Star and editor of Higher Education and National Affairs and History News. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Phillips has stories appearing in Raritan, Cincinnati Review, Chaffin Journal (where his piece was awarded the 2010 Chaffin Award for Fiction), and Fifth Wednesday. He is at work on a novel.
Spencer Reece will be ordained to the Episcopal priesthood in the fall of 2011. He hopes to begin his ministry at Our Little Roses, an orphanage for abandoned and abused girls in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.
Judy Richardson was a staff worker with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for three years in the early 1960s in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama; was a founder in 1968 of the country’s largest African American bookstore; and Director of Information for the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice. She began her film work with Blackside Productions on the Academy Award–nominated Eyes on the Prize. She was Series Associate Producer and Education Director for the series. She also coproduced Blackside’s Malcolm X: Make It Plain. As a Senior Producer with Northern Light Productions she produces African American historical documentaries for TV and museums, including Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968 for PBS and the History Channel film Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters. She lectures and conducts teacher workshops on the modern Civil Rights Movement.
Maxine Scates is the author of Undone (New Issues, 2011) and two other books of poetry, Black Loam and Toluca Street. She is also coeditor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.
Christine Sneed is a graduate of the MFA creative writing program at Indiana University and has published stories in Best American Short Stories, New England Review, Ploughshares, Pleiades, Glimmer Train, and the Massachusetts Review. Her collection Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry recently won the 2009 AWP Grace Paley Prize for Fiction and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press.
Elizabeth V. Spelman is Professor of Philosophy and Barbara Richmond 1940 Professor in the Humanities at Smith College. Among her major published works are Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (1988), Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering (1997), and Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World (2002). A fairly recent convert to the world of rubbish studies, she is at work on a very trashy book.
Jack Spicer, born in Hollywood in 1925, died in San Francisco in 1965. A proponent of the serial poem, with a quasi-magickal interest in the “invisible world,” he was trained as a linguist at UC Berkeley and the University of Minnesota during the period of the Loyalty Oath controversy. Since his death, his work has grown in popularity and influence, and can be found in My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (2008). Also available from Wesleyan: Peter Gizzi’s edition of The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (1998).
Eleanor Stanford’s book of poems, The Book of Sleep, was published in 2008 by Carnegie Mellon Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, the Harvard Review, and many other journals. Last year she lived in Salvador, Brazil, with her family, where she worked as a guidance counselor at an international school. She currently lives in the Philadelphia suburbs with her husband and three young sons.
Ruth Taylor spent ten years in Guatemala working as a journalist before returning to Canada, where she lives with her partner and three children. Her fiction has appeared in the Dalhousie Review, the Nashwaak Review, and echolocation, among others.
Ekwueme Michael Thelwell was in 1970 the founding chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has been a member of the faculty ever since. The Jamaican-born writer, activist, educator, and intellectual received his early education at Jamaica College. Thelwell was active in the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement, participating in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). As a writer of fiction as well as of influential essays, Professor Thelwell’s work has been published nationally and internationally in journals and magazines including the Black Scholar, the Massachusetts Review, Temps Moderne, the Partisan Review, the New York Times, and African Commentary. His novel The Harder They Come (1980) has become a Jamaican classic, and his political and literary essays are collected in Duties, Pleasures and Conflicts (1987).
An international poet, SamanthaThornhill has recently traveled to South Africa, Swaziland, and Hungary to present her work. In 2004, after receiving her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia, she moved to New York City, where she teaches poetry to actors in training at the Juilliard School.
David Torres resides in Madrid, Spain. Poet, scriptwriter, and novelist, Torres also teaches creative writing at Hotel Kafka, a center of literary studies in Madrid. Many of his novels have received recognition in Spain, including El gran silencio (2003), shortlisted for the Nadal Prize, and Niños de tiza, winner of the Hammett Prize for crime fiction. In 2010, his novel Punto de fisión earned the fourth Premio Logroño prize.
Stacey Waite is a PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. Waite has published two chapbooks of poems: Choke (2004 Frank O’Hara Prize winner) and Love Poem to Androgyny (2006 Main Street Rag Chapbook Prize winner). A third chapbook, the lake has no saint, and her full-length collection Butch Geography are both forthcoming from Tupelo Press.
Urban Waite is the author of The Terror of Living, now published in twenty-some countries and available from Little, Brown. His short fiction has appeared in the Best of the West Anthology, the Southern Review, Gulf Coast, AGNI, Hayden’s Ferry Review, West Branch, and many other places. Waite has received writing degrees from the University of Washington, Western Washington University, and Emerson College. After several years in Boston, he now lives in his hometown of Seattle.
Nicole Walker is the author of This Noisy Egg (Barrow Street Press, 2010). Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Bellingham Review, Fence, Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, and Crazyhorse, among other places. She has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and teaches at Northern Arizona University.
Jon Western is Five College Associate Professor of International Relations at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of Selling Intervention and War: The Presidency, the Media, and the American Public (Johns Hopkins, 2005). His writings have appeared in International Security, Foreign Affairs, Security Studies, Political Science Quarterly, Harvard International Review, Ethnopolitics, and Global Dialogue. Prior to joining Mount Holyoke faculty, he was a scholar in residence at the United States Institute of Peace and an intelligence analyst at the US Department of State.
Marina Hope Wilson’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in MiPOesias, Coconut, FourW, and qarrtsiluni. She lives in Brooklyn.
This issue’s cover artist Žilda is from Rennes France. He is internationally known for his often classically influenced street work.
