POET MEMORIAL
Goodbye, Sekou Sundiata
Austin admirers to celebrate late poet for our times on Sept. 11
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, September 10, 2007
The late Harlem poet Sekou Sundiata was a rebel with a big heart. He believed in affirmation. He believed in imagination. He believed in America's capacity for self-examination in a post-Sept. 11, 2001, world. Sundiata also had an abiding faith in the arts — feeling, as he did, that a sublime moment of jazz piano could take him to a place that seemed almost holy.
"I know enough, now," Sundiata said in Austin in March, "that when I see beauty, I hit save."
Jay Janner AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sekou Sundiata recited the Declaration of Independence in the state Capitol rotunda in February. Sundiata, who died in July, posed a question to our nation with his 'the 51st (dream) state.'
Jay Janner AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Poet Sekou Sundiata was a visiting professor at the University of Texas last year. The Humanities Institute and the College of Fine Arts are presenting an event in his honor Tuesday night.
'Are we willing to confront ourselves and stop lying? For a nation or an individual, that's a question of character. Some would say it's a question of one's soul as well.'
SEKOU SUNDIATA
Poet
Sekou Sundiata is dead now, at age 58 — and his sudden passing in New York on July 18 from heart failure has taken from us one of the most daring voices in American poetry. Sundiata's signature was multimedia performance poetry — a mix of spoken word, jazz, theater and film, poetry that could swing and soar, forever true to the cadence of social conscience.
Sundiata, who came of age in the Black Arts movement in the 1960s and 1970s and was the first writer-in-residence at the New School of Social Research in New York, had many champions: singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco, the journalist Bill Moyers, and a legion of spoken-word poets who consider him a godfather. The Village Voice once observed: "He is to contemporary African American poetry what Marvin Gaye is to modern soul."
Austin came to know him well, too. As a visiting professor of humanities at the University of Texas in 2006-07, Sundiata staged what turned out to be his farewell work, "the 51st (dream) state" at Hogg Auditorium on Feb. 28. In the spirit of civic engagement, Sundiata connected with Austin's minority communities, nurtured budding thinkers and artists, and hosted "citizenship potluck dinners" designed to consider the question of American identity.
No surprise that the UT Humanities Institute is hosting a Sundiata tribute at St. James' Episcopal Church at 7 p.m. Tuesday, the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"I had some call to conscience and some call to citizenship (after Sept. 11)," Sundiata said during a talk-back discussion about "the 51st (dream) state" at UT's Ransom Center in March. He said the day of terrorist attacks brought him closer to the idea of critical citizenship, an engaged citizenship that demands of America measured self-examination.
"If you look at Abu Ghraib, or Guantánamo, or the surveillance of Americans, or bypassing the courts, it raises the question of what kind of nation are we. ... Are we willing to confront ourselves and stop lying? For a nation or an individual, that's a question of character. Some would say it's a question of one's soul as well."
Sundiata's "the 51st (dream) state" raised this rhetorical question: If the United States were to add a 51st state, a permanent, irrevocable addition to the union, what would it be? Puerto Rico? The Philippines? The state of war that we know now? Or would that 51st star on our nation's flag honor the dream of what we've always wanted to be as a nation?
Evoking the words of American philosopher Jacob Needleman, Sundiata suggested through his art that the "pursuit of happiness" in America, as offered by Thomas Jefferson, is doomed to fail unless it walks hand-in-hand with the pursuit of virtue. Sundiata's theater-poem — punctuated by jazz riffs, Indian ragas, a Manzanar memory, a Sept. 11 rumination and a defiant poetic confrontation with the n-word — was an invitation for America to look at itself in the mirror of conscience. Look at Hurricane Katrina. Look at the legacy of Sept. 11. Look at the disparity of opportunity in our country. Now, tell me: "What is our character?"
"This question has come up again and again, throughout our history," Sundiata said in March. "And the thing I love about America is that the (democratic) tradition has always responded to that. The abolitionist movement. The labor movement. The women's movement. The suffrage movement. They, to me, have responded to that question — and they created a body of ideas and mythology and music and culture that comes out of that self-critical place."
When profiled in 1995 for Bill Moyers' "Language of Life" poetry series on PBS, Sundiata worried about the abuse of language, how words are so easily manipulated. "Advertising, for example, doesn't mean what it says," he said. "You think it means one thing, but it's really about something else." Sundiata ventured that modern language has become "denatured," but that people coming to poetry "expect at least to hear honest language."
"I tell my students this all the time: Writing is one of the hardest things to do," Sundiata said in Austin, riffing on the idea of poetry as honest language. "It's not like doing scales in music. If you're doing a C-major scale and you play an A-sharp, you can hear it's wrong. And if someone's watching, you know they know.
"But when you're writing, you're there alone. Only you know whether what you've said is true or not . . . And you also know that there may be a word or phrase that may not be true to you – but you'll get applause (for that phrase). People might like you for it; reviewers might like you for it. So the question remains: Who are you, really?"
Sundiata's Austin students got the message. Michelle Faires, a 40-year-old Austinite who had never heard of the poet before working with him as part of the Austin Free Minds Project, says Sundiata changed her life and her perspective. She has quit her massage therapist job and is pursuing a career in social work.
"Sekou passed on to me this conviction that if you're not going to write the truth, if there's not this foundation of integrity , don't write," said Faires. "I don't know how to say this without (being) overwhelmed: But the man got under my skin. He got me thinking, for example, about my own beliefs, my own understanding. You see, I really thought I was an evolved person when it involved issues of race. ... but in truth, I realized at the age of 40 that I still had a lot of work to do.
"Sekou helped me understand that I actually had a very distanced view of community and that I couldn't possibly understand what it might mean to be Muslim, or African American, or Hispanic, until I actually submerged myself into those communities."
bbuchholz@statesman.com; 912-2967
