It is said the eyes are the window to the soul, but what is the face?

I love my face. I guess being told I was pretty when I was a child has helped me to feel good about my features. But I also know that I wear different faces depending on how I am feeling and the circumstances in which I find myself. During meetings I try to wear a professional face, meaning I try to not let my emotions show openly on my face.

When I am reading  or performing my work, my face is very expressive and I try to display the specific emotion of the work I am sharing.

When I am with friends, just having a good time, my face is open and I do not try to conceal or project anything but myself and what I am feeling at the moment.

I try to imagine what my face looks like  during labor and child-birth.  I think  about how my face feels when I am making love.  Does it emit a different smell when I am cooking?  When I take a shower and soap my face or my eyes sting from the salt of the sea or the chlorine in the pool, how do these elements change my face? What is my sad face, when my mother died and I was flying from Jamaica to California to see her before she issued her last breath.  I did not want to see my mother’s death face.

This is my COVID 19 face.  I don’t think it shows that there is a pandemic? It is a selfie and I only wanted to capture part of my face, and the words reflect who I am and who I always want to show up as — I want my face to announce this creative resilience.

What does someone mean when they declare, “Say it to my face.” ? Often it is when something negative is said behind one’s back, and the person saying whatever they are saying  is being called out as a coward. “Say it to my face, damn it!”

Maybe it is akin to what Eleanor Roosevelt means in this quotes: “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.”  How does one look fear in the face?  What does that mean really? To be brave? To push through?

I like face-to-face events. I love the intimacy that these opportunities afford us. This way I get to hear and see, and therefore feel more apt to evaluate the merit of what’s being said. I suppose face-to-face is like eye-ball to eye-ball, although this latter term seems more aggressive as id a dual is taking place — who can out stare whom?

Some people refer to their face as their  mug, this usually suggests a criminal element.

This is my profile indicates a pose, a decided presentation. What about your features? Here again, it tends to be an assessment of supposedly one’s best `side.’

“Keep your face always towards the sunshine — and shadows will fall behind you,” says the poet Walt Whitman.  Do we really know what he means seeing that the quotes is lifted out of context. This is what I think happens when the sun is out, and one faces the sun, but I suspect Whitman is speaking in poetic terms, metaphorically.

J.D. Salinger’s quote is clear, and we don’t have to second guess what he means  when he says, “She was not one for emptying her face of expression. ” Here is a woman who does not attempt to hide what she is feeling –joy or contempt or anger or livid disdain. But look at how the writer puts it, `emptying’…can one also say filling up?

The Roman orator, statesman and writer, Marcus Tullius Cicero, offers a quote which I find to be profound and accurate to a point;  he says “The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.” Let’s ponder this for a moment — the face reflecting the mind and the eyes interpreting.  How accurate is this?  What about a seeing impaired or blind person?

How about this, “Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned–in search of what? It is the same with books…”
from Virginia Woolf.  What is it that you face is seeking?  Where is it looking?  What is it telling others?  What is it concealing? How open or close is your face?  When is it most vulnerable?

Finally, think about this term, “Blackface” popularised  in the United States as a form  of theatrical make-up used predominantly by mostly white performers to represent a caricature of a black person. Imagine that, to blacken the face to poke fun or misinterpret that actions and/or mannerism of a Black person. A racist act.

Side Bar 1: Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892), a humanist,  and an American poet, essayist, and journalist work incorporates transcendentalism and realism; Leaves of Grass, his major work, he self-published in 1855

Side bar 2: J. D. Salinger is best known for  his novel, The Catcher in the Rye.  He ended up being a recluse after this success, and published very little upon till his death, novel The Catcher in the Rye

Side Bar 3: Did you know that Virginia Woolf is considered to be “one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and also a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device?”

There is something to be said about a people who have nationalized a poisonous fruit —our resourcefulness at transformation.

Brought from West Africa, Ackee also known as Akan, if eaten before it ripens and opens its pods naturally  produces toxins– hypoglycin A  and B, that when converted into the body are lethal, and can result in what Jamaicans call vomiting sickness.

How Jamaicans came to figure out when to eat the ackee, to wait until it ripens naturally, and how it came to be made our national dish beats me.  I think it is one of the most beautiful plants, its pear-shaped red colour, shiny black seeds and three pods fruit in each pot, with a menstrual red membrane that must be removed before cooking.

As Jamaica’s national disk, ackee is steamed with salt-fish and eaten with breadfruit, or boiled green banana, fried plantain, or cooked with rice commonly called seasoned rice as a one-pot meal, or now made into patties, or quiche or done in a variety of ways. I recently learned that it can be eaten raw or chopped and tossed into a salad.  Like any fruit, the numerous ways ackee can be prepared is yet to be discovered.

Its pods and seeds are tossed into compose, but the dried ackee pod is elegant, and its decorative abilities  has to be explored; I have long believed its seeds would make beautiful jewelry.

Jamaican are one of the most resourceful and creative people that I know, and I readily admit my bias as a fellow Jamaican.  But truly our creativity and ingenuity are limitless. What we lack is discipline and a spirit of Ujamaa, collective and cooperative economics.

I believe in us.  I believe that African Jamaicans will yet acknowledge and come together in the spirit of fraternity, and create a bright future for the African population. I await all the positives ackee vibes we will unleash as a result of COVID 19.

Stay safe and blessed.  Asè

I’ve long felt there was something innately wrong with praying to someone nailed to a cross. It is a vulgar image, and made more vulgar if I am to believe that the allegedly most powerful person in the world would sacrifice his only son, when the power was in his hand to change the hearts and minds of the persecutors, to whisk away his son, or to eradicate violence all together.

How has this image of “god’s” son nailed to a cross inscribed for us that violence is acceptable? For me it portrays the father as untrustworthy, a man willing to let his son suffer — for the salvation oh mankind? I don’t buy it. Not a pill I am prepared to swallow. As a parent, I find the representation of such as father reprehensible, and certainly no one with whom I have any faith. So where does that lead me?

I read the story with its patriarchal endorsement of violence, and I shift my gaze to the mother going to the grave site and the resurrection — after all it is women who must always weep, and use our tears to wash away man’s violence and transform it into something palatable and hopeful.

Given the global pandemic, Resurrection at this time, is being called for — rising from our slumber into greed, rising from our disregard for the environment, for one another, and for the future we ought to be creating. How do we resurrect our vision? How do we imagine and begin to fashion a new way of existence and development? How do we climb out of the quagmire of mediocrity into which we have stumbled and become community again?

I believe we can. I know we can. I am pronouncing that we will. Our very survival depends on our resurrection from violence and wastefulness.

Let’s begin this new journey and create a cross, not to worship, but to step forth with a vision that is humane and equitable.

You gave me Lean on me

an anthem for

peoplehood

supporting and helping

each other to stand

you said it was more than okay

to need  to lean sometime

on someone and you would

be that someone

that leaning could be fortifying

and strength building

cause we all need someone

to lean on

 

You made me look

at my own hands

differently and those

of my mother

after you sang

Grandma’s Hands

hands were never the same

again for me and hundreds

of children in the Oakland

School district

for whom I played

your song to inspire

them to write incredible

poetry about their hands

their grandmas and friends’ hands

 

You gave such a spin to

Use Me

made me realize

that love was need

and someone using me

and me using someone

was not always bad

could be a deep love

a need as  raw

as plants needing the sun

and you made me come to know

that no one could ever use me up

How could you

when you opened my heart

to understand what

makes a Lovely Day

is the presence of another

a lover   a child   a friend

how we are motivated

and uplifted by the

existence of others

than turn an ordinary day

Into a Lovely Day

I want more of such days

with your voice. calling it in

 

Similarly

a broken heart

can block all the rays

so no matter how I try

Aint no Sunshine

when you’re gone

is the only reality

I can experience

In that moment

our interconnectedness

taking me out

causing me to forget

my truth

 

But you bring me right back

Into life into nature

Into the dream of union

that together

Just the Two of Us

can return  and restore

the two us are

enough

enough

to soar

as you are soaring now

my brother   writer and singer

of songs that thunder…