Om: My Sistagyrl Lotus

admin — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 14:56:00 +0000

Occasionally a writer surfaces whose poetry is so imbued with authenticity, so intuitively wrought, and so keenly aware of its own integrity that we hardly realize while reading it that we are glimpsing both a protest and a celebration of the world around us. This is the case with Veronica Precious Bohanan’s collection of poetry and prose, Om: My Sistagyrl Lotus. With a voice that sounds at once humble and confident, Bohanan explores her response to life’s attempts to reign in and control the limits of her body and heart. What is truly remarkable about this collection is that it speaks to Bohanan’s own highly personal insights while somehow still sounding familiar to the reader. Bohanan reads the faces around her, hears the sounds of strangers’ conversations, and recreates the tensions of sexual and platonic relationships with such sensory acuity that few seams show between the words on the page and the images they invoke. In particular, her second section, entitled "Passport…," unabashedly illuminates the experience of being a visitor, a foreigner, without the exoticizing, gushing verse that so often renders travel poetry impersonal and trite. Venzuela, for example, inspires the realization, "Izn’t Chavez Black?/Oh, that’z the white Christian threat—/A brotha with oil."

Bohanan embraces the ugly and the beautiful without hesitation, revealing herself to be acutely aware that oppression and freedom are specific to places and times. In addition, Bohanan seems to have a gift for the tempos and rhythms of speech, and this translates—more times than not—into prose and poetry vibrant and thriving with the life behind it. While the book, at times, demands patience as it abruptly switches among poetic styles—from flowing prose to sharp verse—the pieces in the book are written in a vernacular that is neither rigid nor forced (seen as she asks, "wat iz da hip hop poetess role ‘n liberation?"). This command of language adds to the sense that the reader is not so much processing words on a page, but being told a story crucial to the reader’s own experience. Here is where Bohanan truly strikes out on her own: she does not suggest through her poetic recollections of disappointment, sorrow, anger, and joy that her experiences are free for appropriation. Instead, Bohanan’s work fulfills the prophecy of her last poem: "writing self-lyrics . . . I create my destiny."

Written by: Maggie Fromm, December 9th 2006

Giuliani Time

admin — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 20:59:00 +0000

Directed by Kevin Keating

Cinema Libre

What politician can, in the span of a few decades, go from being a Kennedy Democrat to a Reagan Republican and, finally, to a man for all parties as Time’s Person of the Year? The answer, as Kevin Keating’s film reveals, is Rudy Giuliani. Keating turns a critical eye on Giuliani’s path towards becoming America’s darling politician by offering a view of the New York Mayor’s pre-September 11th history – a history marked by racism and the overseeing of police brutality. By focusing on Giuliani’s mishandling of petty crimes, police order and race relations, Keating opposes the post-terrorism view of Giuliani as an unquestionable hero. Giuliani Time certainly has its roots in the fury of post-2000 election documentaries that reveal the pervasive but often hidden corruption within the powers that be. What separates the movie from its Fahrenheit 9/11 counterparts is that it presents its anti-Giuliani agenda with less sensationalism. It lacks the indicting soundtrack, the careful cutting and splicing of press conferences into montages that may or may not resemble reality, and the obvious ulterior motive of inciting political rage. All of this makes the film seem more even-handed, when in reality it is not. This deviation from the norm of political documentaries is precisely what makes Keating’s work both compelling and dangerous. The viewer is persuaded, almost without thinking, to take Keating’s depictions of Giuliani as unbiased truth. Because Keating is careful to include commentary from a range of social locations – from professors and nonprofit directors to lawyers and police officers – it takes almost an hour to realize that this film has an agenda of its own, which is aimed at questioning the validity of Giuliani’s hero status. The arrangement of social commentary within the film makes it easy to forget this agenda, to forget the speaking man behind the film. The film, ultimately, serves to reframe the profile of a figure that most of the country knows only in one dimension. The film ends where contemporary eulogizing of Giuliani begins – on September 11, 2001. What Keating provides is undeniably propagandistic in nature even as it plays a role revealing Giuliani’s manifold and serious missteps in his role as a pre-9/11 politician.

Written by: Maggie Fromm, November 29th 2006