Raza Schooling, Nina Simone's Lost Songs

Shonda Buchanan Reading & In Conversation With Vanessa Estelle Williams 

Michael Sedano

It is the best all possible words for an enchanted audience at Pasadena, California’s, Octavia’s Bookshelf, when poet Shonda Buchanan sits for friendly plática with Vanessa Estelle Williams. Today, Williams and Buchanan connect Nina Simone’s life with the poetry collection at hand, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone (link). 

Williams conducts an elegant interview reflecting deep research and a thorough reading of Buchanan’s RIZE Press collection. The interlocutor’s copy sports as many sticky notes as the poet’s reading copy. Every reader’s copy will come to look like these, marked up to recapture reading the words a first time, and how the poet gets it right. The Lost Songs of Nina Simone is an important work.

The duo know Nina Simone’s story, her music, her domestic abuse, her activism, her skin color and why that matters. This they understand with love, and with research befitting their professions. Buchanan is an academic, Williams a writer, producer, and a notably successful actor.

Today’s audience rewards Octavia’s Bookshelf’s generosity for use of its space, buying copies of the featured book to have in hand. When the poet reads from her book, Buchanan and Williams make sure to cite a page number and most listeners read along with the words. 

Being here. Seeing the author. Hearing the words as the poet intends. Reading the words. This is the best of all possible words today.

The poet reads from her chair, or stands in the small space between herself and the front row. Williams remains seated throughout the colloquy, her exuberance, gestures, and energy focused on today’s homage to poetry and Nina Simone.

Shonda Buchanan writes with anguished empathy for Nina Simone. Simone’s life is marked with career peaks and boycotts, greedy exploitation, vicious spousal abuse, alcohol and pills, love, a daughter, her own house bought with her own money, a prodigy’s early career training as a concert pianist.  There are poems about these facts, achievements, sorrows.

Simone’s own voice speaks from her music and for some readers it’s their only awareness. Buchanan writes some poems in Simone’s voice, giving her new words about how it was. Readers can be left uneasy, knowing how it was. 

Vanessa Williams finds the imagined voice convincing. Does Simone talk to Buchanan, Williams wants to know, where do these words come from?

Readers will know. 

Bought us a house, too, Mama.

In the white people's neighborhood.

Put paisley prints on white walls

so I could bang my head a little if I needed to.

Out In the West Texas Town of Del Rio... 

Guest Reviewer: Charles "Chuck" Braithwaite. 

Review: Esparza, Jesús Jesse. Raza Schools: The Fight for Latino Educational Autonomy in a West Texas Borderlands Town. Vol. 4. University of Oklahoma Press, 2023. (link to publisher)

As someone with an interest in how cultural identity has an impact on education, I was anxious to read Raza Schools, especially having lived in borderland communities in the southern Great Plains. 

Although Esparza’s focus is on the very edge of what some people consider the Plains, the story told is certainly relevant to all non-dominant ethnic communities throughout US America in that it details how political and social structures prevent some people from gaining access to educational opportunities, unless they take control themselves and create the resources necessary for their children.

The account of this case study has several important strengths. First, we get a detailed, chronological account of the challenges faced by the Latino community of Del Rio, TX, during their fight for educational autonomy: persistent racism and segregation; state and local government interference; economic hardships. 

Second, the author makes an outstanding case for using oral history and non-archived personal collections (yearbooks, photos, etc.) as data to corroborate official documents and records. 

Third, we get a picture of how, even when ethnic communities are successful, institutional intolerance and bigotry are so difficult to overcome.

We go from the 1600s to the present and see some remarkable changes in the borderlands when it comes to education. I was especially interested to learn about how the Latino community in the 1800s provided educational opportunities for their children in the absence of state provided education. These were called “escuelitas” – small, private, Spanish speaking schools, often held in homes.

The bulk of the book is the story of how a community came together to fight the forces of racism and provide an educational opportunity for their children when it was clear the local and state authorities would not be doing anything to help. 

Ultimately, the story has a sad, but not unexpected outcome with the forced merging of Latino-controlled schools into the white-controlled districts. This led inevitably to problems: loss of autonomy; cultural and social tensions with forced integration; language barriers for Latino students; fewer resources provided to the needs of Latino students.

I have a couple of complaints. 

Although the book does look at problems faced by the African-American community of Del Rio regarding education, and the author doesn’t shy away from discussing the tensions between these communities, I would have liked to see more discussion of this diversity and its impact on what happened in the classroom.  

Also, I’m concerned that readers may miss some of the nuances described in the chapter “When the Chicano Movement Came, Our Schools Went Away.” As someone who grew up in southern California and saw first-hand the tremendous contributions to our communities by La Raza, I would not want readers to get the wrong impression about the Chicano Movement.

Overall, I highly recommend this book to everyone interested in educational and ethnic history of the Plains. As one of Esparza’s informants explained, “that a Latino community could establish and maintain its own educational system along the borderlands at the height of Jim Crow is a history worth telling.”

About our Guest Reviewer:

Chuck Braithwaite graduated from San Gabriel High a couple kilometers from downtown Los Angeles. 

After 4 years in the US Navy, he earned a BA from the Univ of Calif, Santa Barbara, and an MA & PhD from the Univ of Washington. 

He taught speech & intercultural communication at New Mexico State, Arizona State, and for the past 21 years taught at the Univ of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he also served as Editor of Great Plains Quarterly. 

Dr. Braithwaite is now retired, living a couple of kilometers from the Pacific Ocean in Southern Calif.

Bird Forgiveness Book Launch, Louisiana Style

Melinda Palacio

At Octavia Books in New Orleans

The crowd at Octavia Books

With so many choices for fun or relaxing activities during a hot weekday, where the weather in New Orleans threatens to reach a hundred degrees, it's best to do a little homework if you want to guarantee an audience of more than the friends you can count on one hand. Octavia Books, a beautiful, local independent bookstore did their homework, and so did I. Octavia sent weekly announcements to their readers in advance of the book launch and I made sure to give me publisher contacts for local newspaper and radio media for possible publicity before the reading. I was lucky to get a color announcement and write up in the Times-Picayune Nuestro Pueblo column and I had two radio interviews with local station, WWNO and WRBH, the radio for the blind. The result was a standing room only crowd with lots of my different groups coming together Bird Forgiveness book launch. There were Wonder Woman, Poets, Yoga folks, WNBA (Women's National Book Association) members, and lovers of the word, books, and Octavia Books. Bookstore owners Tom Lowenburg and Judith Lafitte have created a gorgeous haven of a bookstore and their events are always filled with plenty of comfortable chairs and wine. During Mardi Gras, I participated in the All Wonder Woman Walking Krewe. I've met some fabulous women in the group including friend, Marti, who is also in the WNBA, and Kay who works for the Baton Rouge newspaper, The Advocate. It's fun how some of my friends belong to overlapping organizations. Thank you to everyone who helped make the New Orleans launch a success. Thanks, again, to Octavia Books. 

My yoga teacher at Wild Lotus brought some fellow students and a friend whom she knew would enjoy my book. It turns out the friend is a regular book browser at Octavia Books; New Orleans is a small town in a big city. At the Wild Lotus Yoga studio, it happens to be Poetry Month. On Wednesday, I was a little late getting to class and I waited until the opening mediation was finished and I was pleasantly surprised to hear my yoga teacher read my poem, The Praying Tree. If I had been on time, she would have asked me to read it, as she did a few weeks ago, but it was really nice hearing her read my poem and interpret it and offer it as a mediation for the day. 

Partial View of Trinity's Organ Pipe.

I was thrilled to have a full house, even world renowned musician and organist at Trinity Episcopal church, Albinas Prizgintas came. One of my favorite activities in New Orleans is listening to the organ pipe concert and walking the labyrinth set up on the altar of the church. If you appreciate music, there's nothing more thrilling than hearing Bach or the Rolling Stones vibrate from the organ pipe throughout the massive church and through one's own body. Albinas plays an eclectic mix of classical, rock, and spiritual songs. Sometimes, I walk the labyrinth, but most of the time, I enjoy a quiet seated meditation. My yoga teacher plays a lot of rock n roll during her class. I've come to appreciate rock n roll as a spiritual practice. Next Tuesday, I will add my poetry to the music of the labyrinth at Trinity Episcopal Church. I don't know how it will all come together, but when Albinas asked if I might read a few poems interspersed between the organ for the labyrinth, I said, 'Yes'. 

Labyrinth at Trinity Episcopal

On Tuesday, there will be an additional stop to the Bird Forgiveness Tour at Trinity Artist Series,
Trinity Episcopal Church at 6pm, 1329 Jackson Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70130.

Next week, the Bird Forgiveness Tour takes me to Cajun-Creole Country, where Louisiana Poet Laureate Emeritus, Darrell Bourque will introduce me (I'm honored to say the least). If you're anywhere near Lafayette next Friday, please come to the Teche Center for the Arts, 210 E. Bridge Street, Breaux Bridge, August 3, 6pm. 

At the end of August, I have the pleasure of returning to the La Palabra poetry series at Avenue 50 Studio, August 26 at 2pm, 131 N. Avenue 50, Highland Park, CA. 

Roxane Gay reclaims her fat, but hates avocados.

Melinda Palacio

Roxane Gay and young fan, Gabby 

            On Wednesday, some 400 people, mostly women, filled the Jewish Community Center (JCC) in New Orleans to hear Roxane Gay in conversation with local author Maurice Ruffin about Gay's memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. The event was hosted by Octavia Books.

            Roxane Gay was just as dazzling and funny as she is in print, and in her tweets. The New York Times best-selling author has 238 K Twitter followers and counting. She dispels fears and phobias about using the word, fat. And we're not talking about Fat as in, do these jeans make my butt look fat, but Fat in only the way a woman who has been 300 pounds overweight can reclaim the word. Gay makes it clear to anyone not familiar with her or her work that she is an expert on being fat in the world. As an adult who has lived with fat body since she was a teenage girl who was raped, Gay sets the rules for how she's going to take control of her body. Recently, she told her family her body was off limits for discussion. It's hard to believe that recent interviewers have deigned to give her advice about weight and dieting.

Roxane Gay and Maurice Ruffin

            Maurice Ruffin, on the other hand, conducted a safe and comfortable interview space and presented an intimate conversation even though there were hundreds of people in the room. The interview filled the audience with joy and laughter. Gay noted in response to a question about the source of her humor, "I'm just funny;" she also shared that her parents are hilarious. Of the interview, local writer, Alexandra Reisner, said:

            "She was very funny and unrehearsed. It didn't feel like watching an interview, it felt like talking to a friend. The questions Maurice asked were specific but also open so she could explore and go where she wanted to with the answers. He didn't try too much to guide or dominate the conversation, he just gave her the framework."

Alexandra Reisner and SRO crowd

Maurice Ruffin can be credited with asking Roxane Gay a question she had never been asked before, "What's your favorite and least favorite food?" Dr. Gay answered that she is a super picky eater and would have to say a rib eye steak medium-rare is her favorite, along with any kind of a sandwich. She also took the air out of the room when she announced that she hated avocados. Four hundred people gasped at the same time. "I'm over it," she said as she explained that as a Haitian, she grew up eating plenty of them.

A patient Roxane Gay signs 400 copies of her memoir in New Orleans.

The world is lucky that Roxane Gay has known she wanted to become a writer since she was 4 years old. Her memoir, Hunger, is not an inspirational weight loss story, but a telling of one woman's truth and a narrative that forced her to face her body and to make changes to feel better, for herself, and not for any societal pressure. However, her journey as an acclaimed published author is certainly inspirational. She spoke about her beginnings as a blogger of rejection and writing about how hurtful those rejections were, yet still being relentless about sending work out, sometimes sending a new piece the very next moment to the same editor who rejected her. She advised to wait a bit.