Happy birthday, Peter Tosh!
Poéfrika
by
3y ago
Peter Tosh (October 19, 1944 – September 11, 1987) was the guitarist in the original Wailing Wailers, a pioneer reggae musician, and a trailblazer for the Rastafari movement. Born Winston Hubert McIntosh, Peter grew up in the Kingston, Jamaica slum of Trenchtown. His short-fuse temper and unveiled sarcasm usually kept him in trouble, earning him the nickname Stepping Razor after a song written by Joe Higgs, an early mentor. He began to sing and learn guitar at a young age, inspired by the American stations he could pick up on his radio. After an illustrious career with the Wailers and as a ..read more
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Happy birthday, Ntozake!
Poéfrika
by
3y ago
"Born Paulette Williams in Trenton, New Jersey to Paul T. Williams (namesake), a surgeon, and Eloise Williams, a psychiatric social worker and educator. The oldest of four children of an upper middle class family. Moved to a then, racially segregated St. Louis at the age of eight (1956/57). Lived there for five years and enjoyed music, dance, art, literature, and opera. Was even bussed to a German-American school where she suffered blatant racism as a part of the Brown versus Board of Education decision. As a part of a rich intellectual family, she was an avid reader of great authors to inc ..read more
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We have moved
Poéfrika
by
4y ago
We are now at https://poefrika2.blogspot.com, and we can't wait to see you there ..read more
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Open letter to Facebook
Poéfrika
by
4y ago
Dear Facebook, My name is Rethabile Masilo. I am a poet and a language instructor from Lesotho, although today I live in France, with a prior five-year scholarly stint in the USA, at Maryville College in Tennessee. I have had four poetry books published as well as two poetry anthologies. Poetry came to me when I was but a teen, in the seventies. It took me over when I was in America, in exile, in the early eighties, because of at least two reasons. One, I used it to expunge my experience of political violence in Lesotho, when my family lost a son, at seventeen, and a nephew, at three. The la ..read more
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Scalp, a poem by Rethabile Masilo
Poéfrika
by
4y ago
And when on the streets of this town you see skulls, lifeless with age, you’ll know how long this secret has been going on. You’ll always know the meaning of it, after you hear the howling of their thoughts. And in the bowl of their scalps you will touch bulbs of gold lilies with your fingertips, of garlic and onions, of all alliums of life, and Dutch hyacinths, and tulips which once grew into luxuriant curls upon their heads. To emulate death, men have been making a collection of faceless stamps in a folder fat with womanhood. Can you see where the spade went in, like a scalpel after a lobot ..read more
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Robert and Maya, a poem by Rethabile Masilo
Poéfrika
by
4y ago
Having read them far more than any other troubadour has made me their child, learning their language whose gist I quickly lapped up with my tongue, so that now when I hear my people sing I know someone has been trying to kill us. But killing doesn't make us dead for good. And often you might have seen some, on the prairies, who were determined to tear our cocoa backs with whips, even as ancestor presences made the cotton fields black, and the wild thorn-shrub threw its veil across the day, with us pushing voodoo through the marshes of the South. We have songs. When harsh is the darkness of th ..read more
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Soweto '76
Poéfrika
by
4y ago
I was fifteen, but I remember the events of 16 June 1976 like it was last week. Black kids rose against the Apartheid state in South Africa, and refused Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools. They stamped their collective foot and said "No!" And their cry shook the world. Police opened fire and the first kid to go down was Hector Pieterson. I know you've seen the now famous picture of his limp body in the hands of Mbuyisa Makhubo, his sister running alongside them. "I saw that he was bad, but I thought that he was just wounded, you know," remembers Hector's sister, Antoinette Sithole ..read more
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Upon reading a poem about Madiba, by Rethabile Masilo
Poéfrika
by
4y ago
—for Gary Corseri Some years ago I was dazed by a poem on Nelson Mandela. My surprise did not come from the fact that the poem was well-crafted, well-paced, brisk as a walker through a park; someone cross-examining their head with enquiries on love, a man or a woman with a mind ripe with the affairs of life. My surprise did not come from the fact that the poet loved the subject of his song the way a student admires a mentor, nor from the fact that both men lived on opposite sides of the colour bar. Nor did it fall from the sky, even if manna, gift-wrapped in careful words, were hand-delivere ..read more
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Jigsaw years, a poem by Rethabile Masilo
Poéfrika
by
4y ago
By light of lamp we study the pieces, strewn, cut prints on the floor of our room. We want to unite them the way we pine for the chance to bring the edges of the world together. But until we find the right blend, they won’t look like you and I on a mattress of summer leaves, oblivious to the world though mindful of its best. The night I found you in heat with your eyes as open as spy-holes, out of fear, we said let’s present our lives to the future; then found there are always battles to fight, even as we realised we still needed to know how to glue the pieces together; dark ones and less dark ..read more
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Deadweight, a poem by Rethabile Masilo
Poéfrika
by
4y ago
This park where I am lying now with my eyes sealed is quiet. I feel close to the roots of its plant life so much that I sometimes hear them speaking, their low murmurs like the sound of whales talking; I have their hairs on the skin of my belly; the weight of the world is upon me. Perhaps it is because I miss my children, whom life took from me, because here I am alone, and it is quiet except for the incessant chirping of birds through the day, the loud flutter of their life, the distant sound of humans in the daytime, roots breathing as they search the loam of the world with their fingers. I ..read more
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