Sharpening your saw: mind, spirit, and heart
I remember assigning Joe Brainard’s poem “I Remember” as part of what I called the I-search paper in my literature class.
I remember students cringing when asked to write their own “I Remember” poem. They asked how long should it be? What am I supposed to remember? Where should I place it in the I-search paper?
I remember white students always pushing back because I was a Black female instructor not because they didn’t want to the work.
I remember learning about the poem in a doctoral ecopoetics workshop. I was the only Black student in the class, and there were no African American professors teaching in the Ph.D. program.
I remember grappling with Camille Dungy’s edited anthology Black Nature, Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. I struggled with how black nature was different from any other nature.
I remember the poems of Lucille Clifton and other African American poets “celebrating” grass, trees, bees, wind, water, and fire.
I remember Evie Shockley’s “31 words * prose poem [#12],” Tony Wynn’s “a brown girl’s nature poem: provincetown,” Ed Roberson’s “be careful” and Marilyn Nelson’s “Archais Hypogea.”
I remember writing a two-page poem of childhood memories on my grandparents’ farm, dancing in the rain, picking blackberries, and slopping hogs.
I remember I couldn’t breathe through microaggressions when I used my faith as a theory while reading Agnes Grey as a sermon.
I remember kneeling on my yoga mat praying for strength to walk back into the classroom of white female students to teach them the importance of African American literature through the lens of diary writing.
I remember anger burned my lungs as they equated their economic struggles with that of their Black neighbors, claimed to have one Black friend, and refused to engage in the Black experience.
I remember being rejected twice for a job when interviewed by an all-white committee.
I remember theory is invented when space is created and God created us, you and me, male and female, in the image of him, in the likeness of him “so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground” (Genesis 1:26). Not rule over people.
I remember we, Black folks, exist in nature, are a part of nature, come from nature and we write about moments that affect our lived experience.
What do you remember?