Aqua Beats and Moon Verses: Volume I

admin — Thu, 03 May 2007 19:25:00 +0000

Chicago based performance artists camil.williams and veronica precious bohanan (a.k.a. AquaMoon) explore womyn-centered issues, such as rape, molestation, incest, and women in hip hop from an African American perspective. These themes are interpreted through the use of choreopoems (poems intended to be acted out on stage), and there is also a CD that comes with the book. The message is about speaking out, standing up and becoming empowered (hence the subtitle: Dismantling The Culture of Silence!)

The voice is strong and brave, often swirling and soaring with the zeal of true spiritual questing. The writing style is hip, colorful and there is a wonderful buzz of energy in the writing (and the music) that makes you want to bust through every wall of bs and suppression. It’s like a new age Allen Ginsberg rant at America, spelled with a k. These poets are all about encouraging African-American woman to free themselves in order to self-define their roles in the Black community, hip hop culture and overall society.

A few weeks ago when the entire country was having a conversation about the nasty “nappy headed hos” comment, hip hop moguls and male artists were called on the carpet for adding to a culture growing increasingly tolerant of demeaning women in lyrics and videos. While listening to the CD, I thought it would be great to see an in-depth discussion about the world of hip hop inhabited by men and women, say, between Russell Simmons and these fierce artists!

I also really loved a scene called "Lullaby: Girl-Childs." At one point in the scene, Aqua Beats says “Everybody talks about the fatherless black boy.” And Moon Verses responds, “But what about the fatherless & the motherless black girl?”

What about her, indeed. She deserves support and a voice. Through AquaMoon, she’s got it to the beat of Sista-Soul-Friends!

Written by: Cheryl Reeves, May 3rd 2007

Om: My Sistagyrl Lotus

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

By Veronica Precious Bohanan

UnSilenced Woman Press

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