FreeQuency: "The Gospel of Colonization"

When Mwende "FreeQuency" Katwiwa started speaking this piece, I thought, "Oh, good! This is going to be about immigration. We need that so much right now."

And then she dropped the words "Jesus Christ" into a sentence and I thought, "Oh, dear. I didn't know she was into that."

See, the thing is, FreeQuency is located in New Orleans (about 45 miles from where I live) so we've been in contact about her coming to my campus in the spring. But while there's nothing wrong with being a Christian, of course, in Louisiana, it's often connected to a particularly conservative -- and even oppressive -- worldview. So I was startled and momentarily disappointed, but she quickly moved on.

Only a matter of seconds later, she was channeling Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and I was, again, a FreeQuency fangirl.

FreeQuency is the current Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion. If you haven't been exposed to her before, you're about to find out why.

Waging Revolution One Act At A Time

Yesterday morning, after yoga class, I broke down in tears over breakfast because the world is so full of suffering and I can't fix it. There are no magic answers. I've been telling my students for years I got no pixie dust. I know it's not a sprint; it's a marathon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the world's so full of suffering and there seems to be so little I can do.

It's not that I've never done my part. In fact, I've always been altruistic. At six, I won a dollar in an art contest (at a time when you could buy a camera for a dollar) and I took my whole family out for ice cream. My father was stunned.

At eleven, I stomped out of Sunday School after telling off the girls in my class -- in front of our teacher -- for talking mean about a little girl because she was poor. At thirteen, I opted out of joining the church (a very radical stance in my world) about the same time I started dancing with Black guys at school (because the White guys didn't know how and I loved to dance). At sixteen, I did an all-interview term paper on racial discrimination in the city where I lived -- garnering me the class's "National Association for the Advancement of Cows and Pigs Award" at the end of the semester.

By the time I was in my late 20's, I had dropped out, blazed my way through San Francisco, and joined the National Prison Center in Iowa City, Iowa (the collective putting out the Prisoners Digest International and the headquarters of the Church of the New Song, a religion that formed in the federal joint in Atlanta and won all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court). Needless to say, this connection offered me many opportunities to put myself out there on front street. Such as the time I got Chief of Classification and Parole Witkowski at Leavenworth so worked up, he had a goon squad carry me to the edge of the concrete steps out front and threaten to throw me down them while he was screaming.