preface.

 Don’t look at the meaning. Focus on the word. Look at its shape. Feel the crooked syllables as you say it. Feel the harsh consonants. Hear the lack of rhythm, the unsteadiness. Say it again. Remember the unfamiliarity when you first met it. That urge to pronounce it without knowing the pronunciation. Creating sound with no reference. Being caught without your bearings but still acting. Improvising. Feel the sudden disruptions of the word, the unpredictable roadblocks, the struggle required to reach the finish. Switch to the meaning. “Beauty”. After all that. All that pain. All that conflict and catastrophe, and all you can tell yourself is that it was beautiful.

 

This is the black diasporic experience in three syllables. This word is Jay-Z, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, The Haitian Revolution, the history of Jamaica, American history, Angela Davis, Bob Marley, Frederick Douglas, Malcolm X, Biggie and Tupac in three flips of the tongue. The word itself shows that beauty is found in the most unlikely places. And no place is more unsuspecting than the crevices and the brow sweat of our struggle. Black lives know, on an intimate level, what it means to have tasted and digested struggle. We have consistently transformed strife into strivings and sorrows into sermons. Didn’t we take coal and make Cool-J? Transformed suffering into song, and song into soul? Haven’t we taken our rags and wrung out riches every time? There is indescribable undeniable beauty in the struggle they’ve said. This book is my personal attempt to dig up diamonds where the news anchors will tell you there's only dirt. Crystals, where the school board and congress will tell you there is only college rejection letters and crime. It is my short attempt to locate and discover what my ancestors across this African diaspora have excavated with ease for centuries. And I know this amazing archeology will continue long after my stain has dried.

 

Admittedly, parts of this book will require a compass of curiosity and an extra-large magnifying glass to find the silver lining. Look for it. It'll be there, hidden beneath and between the sentences. Some of these poems will be more grotesque than pulchritudinous. More beast than beauty. Some poems will be carefully manufactured and adjusted to your shoe size. Others will more easily slide onto the feet of your sister, your professor, your crossing guard, friend, mother, or lover. In certain instances, there will be all search and no treasure to be found at all. But sometimes the search for light, almost as much as the light itself, equally illuminates the darkness we find ourselves in. There will also be pieces that are all jazz and no blues. All smiles and back-to-back joints with no commercials. I encourage everyone of all hues, textures and ingredients to read these poems. I encourage you to join me in seeing the blessings in the breakdowns and the backaches. Many black lives have done this before, are doing as you read these words, and will continue to do this forever. 

 

 

Struggle comes in all forms. It tiptoes into our living rooms. It sexy walks across our politics. It stumps its toe and stumbles into our peace. It has long affairs with our self-esteem and sits at a table playing dominos with our past. But when it tries to sucker punch our future and our worldview, we must sidestep it, grab its fist and use it as a tool to carve out new possibilities. We must dance with struggle and familiarize ourselves with the swiftness of its charleston, synchronize with its Electric Slide, and anticipate the precision of its breakdance. To have never known turbulence is to have never truly appreciated moments of stability. Struggle for peace. Struggle for revolutionary imaginations. Struggle for truth. Struggle for our own personal growth in relationships and our relationships with the world. This book is an effort to help myself and the world, whether local or global,  not look past but make painstaking eye contact with the hard wood floors of our hardships. Find the soft beauty beneath the floorboards, and right here,

on the surface.