What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There had always been black people in and out of our house, and from the outset I had been taught that for them life was defined by struggle and filled with injustice.
Back in those early days when I began my apprenticeship as a poet, I also tried to voice our anger, spirit of defiance and resistance in a Jamaican poetic idiom.
You go through the Civil Rights struggle, everybody knew the songs - 'We shall overcome.' Everybody would sing it. Music helped us. James Brown, 'Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud.' They helped black people figure out how to navigate what was a very treacherous place in America for them.
As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.
In this life, to earn your place you have to fight for it.
I am often asked why I started to write poetry. The answer is that my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences of the black youth of my generation, coming of age in a racist society.
My composition often goes toward the black middle class or the black super-wealthy or strong historical black figures.
Black people need some peace. White people need some peace. And we are going to have to fight. We're going to have to struggle. We're going to have to struggle relentlessly to bring about some peace, because the people that we're asking for peace, they are a bunch of megalomaniac warmongers, and they don't even understand what peace means.
Harlem's streets lead backward, into history, straight to a work such as 'This Was Harlem.'
Merely by describing yourself as black you have started on a road towards emancipation, you have committed yourself to fight against all forces that seek to use your blackness as a stamp that marks you out as a subservient being.