BFA in Creative Writing ProgramToday I wrote the hardest lines. Sean Bell, a young man supposedly destined to be a young husband and father, redirected to a young death, left my fingers absentminded, my brain working to reconnect my heart to its spirit. Today, the names of men and women and children who’d been killed by acts of police brutality slid from my brain through my neck, to my shoulders, which sagged into my arms, the elbows droopy, the wrists reluctant to will the palms and fingers to the computer’s keypads. I had a task to complete. Despite my enormous pain at seeing those names, those incidents, those dates, all those bullets, all those weeping parents, friends, lovers, neighbors, I had a deadline, and so I wrote the heaviest lines today; today I wrote the weight out of me. At my dissertation defense, my great mentor, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, asked me, her voice deep and husky, warm-warm, her voice asked me how I wrote the poems filled to the brim with pain. Today, as I sat to write those desperate lines, I thought of Maria, and I thought of all the people who I’ve leaned on during those weeks prior to the 2002 invasion into Baghdad, all of those strangers whose hands I held, whose voices rose with mine long into the day, all of those strangers who ran when I ran away from those sudden sprays of pepper, those sudden infringements into our peaceful rallies, those reminders that somewhere lurking in sidewalks, is a world of fear that smells like hate. I said to Maria, I walk, I think, I live, I try to love, I talk, I lean into people, I listen, and then I write, and then it’s over. It’s out of my body, and over. And in those lines live all the people who stood with me. I want to tell you this: my lover stands in the kitchen blending peanuts and vinegar and cayenne pepper into a spicy peanut sauce. She looks the part of joy, leaning into her food processor, a hand on her hip. She’s just read to me a newspaper article about a woman who died on the floor of a hospital while the staff looked on, doing nothing. There was deep sadness in her eyes, and now, there is joy in her posture. Dearest students, I want to walk with you, I want to listen with you, I want to teach you the simple dialects of being alive in this turbulent world, this delight-filled trench we all walk in. Dearests, I want you to teach me your language, to dictate your ideologies, I want you to trust to me your thoughts, your desires, the design of your hearts’ chambers. Perhaps I should ease from this lyric space and tell you I have qualifications. Degrees and such. Teaching experience and such. But what I want you to hear is that I have need and want to work with you, each of you; I want to architecture your visions into language, your dreams, as Audre Lorde says, into actions. In direct speech, I should tell you I work in gender/sexuality studies, I work in African Diaspora studies, I work to tragedy the lines, to see the layers/palimpsests, the effacements and disintegrations in language, culture, and the mind. I am author of South of Here (New Issues Press, 2005), fiction editor for ragazine, blog editor for ZORA, and a book reviewer for hercircle. Educational Background: PhD in Literature & Creative Writing with concentrations in PIC (Philosophy, Interpretation & Culture) and African Diasporic Studies, SUNY-Binghamton; MFA in Creative Writing, Western Michigan University; MA in Literature, Western Michigan University.
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Metta Sama, PhD, MFA, MA