February 7, 2021
culture
I find myself defending the Super Bowl
Letter to a Brazilian Friend
I understand your reluctance to watch the Super Bowl, but, much to my surprise, I find myself wanting to tell you why you should watch it.
I’m not recommending that you watch any other American football games. I have a lot against it. Let me count the ways:
It’s too dangerous, certainly for kids in school who want to play it. The record of injuries, especially concussions, is terrible, and the injuries do not stop as players go on to college and the pros.
It doesn’t even feel like a sport sometimes. A college team, for example, can have a hundred players on the roster! This is partly because they need to have bodies to put in when other players get injured. But the weirdest thing is that a “team” is composed of multiple different teams. Most players play either offense or defense, but rarely both. I mean, in basketball, soccer, etc., everyone has to play “both ends of the field”. (Baseball allows the pitcher to play offense only in the AL(?).) Football feels like a military campaign except that soldiers have to “play” both offense and defense.
Football culture, at least among the fans, sucks. My brain is condemned to remember several decades ago, when UNC football fans discovered that their SUVs - the Ford Bronco in particular - had enough ground clearance to park over the graves in the old cemetery on the UNC campus! I think they found the best parking on top of the graves of slaves, which were pretty low (it’s worth visiting, BTW). That symbolizes entitled football fans to me. I have more respect for the players.
Iris and I have lived at “football schools”, UT Austin and UG Athens. ’Nuff said.
The athleticism, especially at the pro level, is astounding and it’s often on display in the Super Bowl. Many successful plays, especially passes, are almost supernatural. (This happens in all sports of course.)
Nevertheless, I don’t usually watch football games other than the Super Bowl. Sometimes I watch UNC games, hoping that they loose. If UNC ever gets a good football team, it risks becoming yet another “football school”, a horrible fate.
Reasons to watch the Super Bowl
The Super Bowl is different. It’s one of the most-watched events in sports, not as big as the World Cup, of course, but big.
This sometimes means that the football itself is exceptional. Sometimes it’s boring, of course. If one team dominates, the game becomes like soccer when one team is up one or two goals: boring.
BUT, the Super Bowl is one of the best ways to understand American culture (do I need to put that in quotes?). All the talking heads before and during the game clue you into how many Americans talk about sports.
The advertisements. A Super Bowl ad costs in the millions of dollars per minute! This means that most of the ads are shown for the first time at the Super Bowl. You’ve got to admit that American advertisers can be very creative, often very funny (foreign ones, too, I imagine). In fact Super Bowl ads can usually be found online, where you can watch them without watching the Super Bowl itself. I have done that in the past.
The halftime show. You think the events in the Roman Colosseum were amazing? Try the over-the-top Super Bowl halftime show. Personally I find most of them pretty dumb, but not all. Prince was amazing, for example. I don’t know what the show is this year if they haven’t canceled it. It’s worth watching at least the beginning.
I believe that Amanda Gorman will read a poem this year. I don’t know if this will be before or during the game.
So we plan to watch the Super Bowl
At least the first half or so, along with your son and hopefully you.
abraços, ge
I ended up watching a fair amount of the first half and then switching away…
… Miss Scarlet & The Duke on PBS Masterpiece Theater.
Kate Phillips (Peaky Blinders) stars in a six-part mystery as the
headstrong, first-ever female detective in Victorian London, who won’t
let any naysayers stop her from keeping her father’s business running.
Stuart Martin (Jamestown) plays her childhood friend, professional
colleague, and potential love interest, Scotland Yard Detective
Inspector William Wellington, a.k.a., The Duke.
It’s a lot of fun and has good feminist creds.
February 6, 2021
tunisia
Urban Tunisian Children
I wrote the following comment to Michael Kaplan’s FB photos of Gafsa children.
These children are beautiful and often very sweet to deal with.
On the other hand, houses in Gafsa were closed to the outside world, with only a closed door to the street and a few small high windows. Their outdoors was in the courtyard (a wonderful invention, especially if it had a garden). This meant, as far as I could tell, that children in the streets were basically unsupervised. They gathered in groups of a dozen or more and wandered about. One of their sports was to harass helpless people, mostly old people, women and foreigners. I remember a tiny curly haired girl of about 3 who knew to sing “Bonjour Madam, Gaddesh el 3tham?”, an insult, when she saw me. I remember looking down a dirt street and seeing a doomed cat being swung by its tail in amidst a group of small torturers. Sort of Lord of the Flies.
Some days I avoided going outside at all because I didn’t want to face the children. I was in no danger, but it could be extremely unpleasant.
Things were different in the Gafsa oasis. People lived in huts made of palm fronds or in tents. People of all ages were usually outdoors, where they could see their children. I loved walking in the oasis, especially visiting my best student’s family.
I came to believe that when a family moved from the oasis or the countryside into a town, they went from a culture where little was hidden to one where much was hidden, especially the women, and where children lost their supervision.
Yet, as Michael’s photos show, these children were supremely beautiful and a joy to be with individually.
February 5, 2021
friends
I take a jab at “jab”
My friend Rob Anderson posted this on Facebook yesterday. This link might work better.
At least one friend has censored my use of the
word "jab" to refer to injections. Sorry, I read
The Guardian a lot. And the word 'shot' is
triggering--deep childhood trauma... So I'm
asking for a vote of preferred word choice.
Please elect one of the following (yes, I know
they are not exact synonyms):
Jab
Shot
Injection
Vaccine / Vaccination
Fauci Ouchie
Note: your input won't affect my verbal behavior...
I proudly out myself as the person who tried to help Rob by objecting to his sudden and embarrassing adoption of “jab” in the last couple of months. Rob became a kind of Coronavirus himself with little “jabs” sticking out everywhere, attaching themselves to our ears! He’s actually contagious: just look at these well-meaning friends of his, all going “jab”, “jab”, “jab”, “jab” ….
While I can accept a defense of childhood trauma, I have to question whether he’s traumatized by all the words in his list. Rob, were you traumatized by “injection”, “vaccination” as well as by “shot”?
“Jab” has begun to traumatize me! Have pity!
As far as I recall, Rob never used the word until the Pandemic. Surely he must have used another word before being brainwashed by the Guardian and people with haughty accents.
Marian Sue Kirkman correctly notes that “The line between jaunty and precious is sometimes blurry…” but she’s too polite to point out that Rob has crossed it. As the poets wrote, “Ich habe genug!”
Perhaps the worst aspect of “jab” is that it’s outdated “vulgar” slang beloved by British politicians, their medical system and stuffy British media. In fact, some British think that the word is American (!), no doubt due to Anglophilies like Rob who think they are being trendy. (See accompanying poem and especially the comments.)
I encourage Rob to teach us cool new British words like “dench”, “peng”, “piff”, “clapped”, “wavey”, “gwarning”, “rah”, “skrr”, “safe!”, “bombaclart/bloodclart”, “wasteman”, “thirsty”, “paigon”, “scrape”, “sket”, “rents”, “next man”, “mandem”, “gyaldem”, “fam”, “mate”, “m9”, “brudda”, “peng ting”, “roadman”, “donny”, etc.
In spite of his pig-headed linguistic stubbornness (“your input won’t affect my verbal behavior…”) Rob remains my M9.
Rob Anderson replies
My M9 George has benevolently tried to direct me
away from my churlish and naive ways, and I see
now he may have a point. I didn't mean to needle
him or others; I merely sought to use a ten-cent
word rather than a twenty-dollar Latinate one.
(And, yes, maybe, I wanted to be a bit jaunty
[< French gentil].) Perhaps I should inoculate myself
against misunderstanding by using more emojis (😉, 😬),
or inject more obvious humor to lighten things up.
In his well-meaning effort to enlighten me,
though, my dear compadre has made jabs of his own.
I was especially pricked by being called
"pig-headed," "contagious," and *sniff* a
"Coronavirus"! I don't think he intended to stick
it to me, pierce the veil of civility, or puncture
the balloon of our friendship. So I suffered no
percutaneous scarification 😬, and, whereas I may
not abandon my use of 'jab', I will seek to vary
my vocabulary. (I am increasingly fond of "Moderna
vaccine.") Hopefully, further adverse reactions
will be rare, and there will be no soreness at
this site.
PS: If I do say 'jab', it doesn't make me a Tory
or a Brexiteer!
January 31, 2021
peacecorps tunisia
Africa
Africa was once the name of a Roman province
Here is the second paragraph for you to read more easily:
Devant l'invasion arabe (VIIème siecle), les Berbères
du Sud doivent se replier. Ils occupent, effet,
"un passage étroit, qui est la seule voie d'invasion
possible pour les tribus de la province Tripolitaine
vers la province d'Afrique.
In other words, the red arrow along the Tunisian coast is the route the Berbers took from the East into “Africa”.
You’ll notice, too, the name l’lfriqiya in the following paragraph of the text. That is the Arab name for Afrique, the Roman name for Tunisia and later our word for the whole continent.
Au cœur de la Tunisie, voici le berceau du mot “Afrique”
I found this article at webdo.tn
Mar 15, 2012
 |
| Dans le nord-ouest de la Tunisie, la région qui fut le grenier à blé de Rome se nomme Friga. |
Ce terme géographique de Friga découle du nom
d’une vieille tribu numide et existe encore de nos
jours selon deux déclinaisons.
La première, c’est la famille Frigui qui vient de
cette région.
La deuxième, c’est le village de Lafareg (notre
photo) qui regroupait ce clan.
Le mot tunisien Friga est à l’origine du mot
Afrique.
En effet, les Romains ont adopté ce toponyme
original et l’ont légèrement altéré pour obtenir
Africa, nom antique de la Tunisie qui deviendra
celui du continent entier.
Plus tard, les Arabes, ayant conquis la Tunisie,
garderont l’appellation romaine de Africa qui
deviendra Ifriquiya.
Quant au terme initial de Friga, racine
étymologique tunisienne du mot Afrique, il
continue à être usité dans le nord-ouest.
I took a photo of the same sign
The reason for this seeming coincidence is that Hatem Bourial was the guide on a trip that I had helped organize in 2012, a year after the Tunisian Spring. A group of about a half dozen former Peace Corps volunteers (RPCVs) traveled back to Tunisia with the help of Jerry Sorkin. The trip was different from most tours of Tunisia because we visited the locations where each of us had been stationed in the Peace Corps, and some of these places were definitely not for tourists.
Standing in front of this sign on a beautiful crisp day, at the original heart of Africa, felt ancient and sacred.
Linguistic note
You’ll notice that the last letter of Lafareg - q, a sound which English speakers cannot distinguish or pronounce very well - is pronounced g in the local dialect. The same was true in Gafsa (not Qafsa), the town where I lived for three years on the south.
January 29, 2021
photography
Alfred Stieglitz and the Making of Modern Photography by Rick Halpern |
FRAMES Magazine (my emphasis)
Most readers have at least a passing familiarity with Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), the early twentieth-century photographer and impresario, but it is likely that few realize the extraordinary impact he had on the acceptance of photography as an art form. The child of German immigrants to the United States, Stieglitz first picked up a camera while studying engineering in Europe. Intrigued by the new medium, he soon began writing critical essays on photography as an art form for various journals and successfully entered the contests and competitions that defined the burgeoning creative field. It was only after his return to the US that Stieglitz began to have real influence on photographic practice and on the rapidly expanding community of American photographers. Through his own creative work, his leadership in leading photography clubs, his organization of key exhibitions and, crucially, the publication of the pioneering journal Camera Work, Stieglitz re-shaped the way we think about the photographic image.
Pictorialism (I like it)
At the turn of the last century, when Stieglitz began experimenting with the camera, photography in both Europe and the United States was dominated by an ethos known as pictorialism. This was a style that sought to emulate late Victorian oil and watercolor painting, romantic in choice of landscape subject, utilizing a soft focus and subdued middle gray tones. When humans appeared in the frame, they often posed nude or in neo-classical dress (see figures 1 and 2 below). The debates that swirled around photography as a medium asked whether it could be considered an art in its own right, or simply a technical derivative of painting. Not all photographers adhered to pictorialism and, in Germany and Austria, in particular, “secessionists” sought to break with both this pictorial aesthetic and the idea that photography needed to be considered as an adjunct to established fine art media. It is not clear whether Stieglitz had much contact with these rebels during his European sojourn, but on his return to the US he rapidly emerged as a pioneer seeking to take photography in a radical new artistic direction.
Figure 2. Clarence White, “Nude with Mirror,” 1907 (with permission of the Getty Museum).
Stieglitz talked about photography as art
Assuming leadership of the New York Camera Club, Stieglitz transformed its newsletter into a proper journal, using it as a platform to promote different forms of photography and, crucially, to make the case for photography as integral art form. He also continued to refine his own photographic practice, wandering New York City with an 8 x 10 plate camera and making several images such as “Winter, Fifth Avenue” and “The Terminal” (see Figure 3) that now are considered early masterpieces of realism that stand in stark contrast to the ethereal aesthetic of pictorialism. Stieglitz gathered around him a group of like-minded photographers, intent on turning their cameras on the gritty urban energetic spaces of Manhattan and, in 1902, organized and displayed their work in an exhibition at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park — one of the first times that photographs were displayed on their own in North America. Equally as important, Stieglitz used the opening of the exhibition to announce a new movement, the “Photo Secession,” which aimed to break from the artistic restrictions of not just pictorialism but the refined world of high art generally.
(I don’t recall reading that Stieglitz wanted to break free of high art, but, if so, why call it “art” in the first place?)
Figure 3. Alfred Stieglitz, “The Terminal,” 1893 (permission of the Getty Museum).
The radicalism of this move became clear a few months later when Stieglitz, having resigned from the New York Club, began publishing Camera Work, a remarkable journal each issue of which contained large hand-developed photogravure prints, reviews of exhibitions, and critical articles on a range of art topics. Much of the writing in Camera Work had a programmatic ring to it, with Stieglitz’s opening editorial in the inaugural number reading like a manifesto that both championed careful technical reproduction and argued for photography as a stand-alone art form:
Photography being in the main a process in
monochrome, it is on subtle gradations of tone and
value that its artistic beauty so frequently
depends. It is therefore highly necessary that
reproductions of photographic work must be made
with exceptional care, and discretion of the
spirit of the original is to be retained, though
no reproductions can do justice to the subtleties
of some photographs. Such supervision will be
given to the illustrations that will appear in
each number of Camera Work. Only examples of such
works as gives evidence of individuality and
artistic worth, regardless of school, or contains
some exceptional feature of technical merit, or
such as exemplifies some treatment worthy of
consideration, will find recognition in these
pages. Nevertheless, the Pictorial will be the
dominating feature of the magazine.
Published till 1917, the journal stands as a landmark in fine art photography. It not only commented critically on the major trends of the day and advocated for the ideas of the secession, it introduced the work of such luminaries as Edward Steichen, Gertrude Käsebeir, Eva Watson, and Paul Strand to a hungry international audience.
During the period he was involved with the production of Camera Work, Stieglitz was busy with related projects aimed at advancing the acceptance of photography and widen the boundaries of established art. He opened a small gallery on New York’s Fifth Avenue to display the sort of work he deemed at the forefront of the secessionist movement and, perhaps more importantly, collaborated with curators at leading museums to mount large exhibits. Major shows in Pittsburgh in 1903 and Buffalo in 1910 exhibited fine art photographs on their own and helped gained widespread acceptance of the medium. It is well worth noting that Stieglitz also used Camera Work, his Fifth Avenue gallery, and his connections with museums to promote sculpture and Avant-garde painting, particularly the work of August Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Mary Cassatt, and his lover Georgia O’Keefe.
The importance of his work as an impresario and publisher notwithstanding, Stieglitz’s own practice as a photographer is his greatest legacy. Arguably his most enduring work was created in this same period of artistic ferment. His 1907 photograph, “The Steerage,” endures as a masterpiece (see Figure 4) of content, form, and perspective. Not only did it number among his favorite images, Stieglitz published and republished it over the course if his long career, and consciously cultivated its status as an icon of early twentieth century photography, but with good reason. It is powerful in so many ways: the geometric lines that frame its subject, the dramatic class differences to which it speaks, the way its immigrant theme resonates so deeply with American society in the Progressive era.
Figure 4. Alfred Stieglitz, “The Steerage,” 1907 (permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
If the uncompromising realism of photographs such as “The Terminal” and the “Steerage” mark a break with the sentimentality of pictorialism, Stieglitz exploded neoclassical interpretations of the female form with other images. Many of his now well-known nudes of O’Keefe present distinctly unromantic views of pubic hair and asymmetrical breasts. A series of O’Keefe’s hands also are important, anticipating modernist sensibilities. Perhaps paramount, though, in this category of Stieglitz’s prolific work, at in this stage in his life, were the pictures of a family friend, Ellen Koeniger, shot while she swam at his rural retreat at Lake George, NY. Eschewing any effort to capture a classic form, Stieglitz shot Koeniger emerging from the water in a modest Edwardian bathing costume that nonetheless clung to her body in near transparent fashion. The best image depicts only her dripping backside — almost a rebuke to the norms of the nude, then and now (see Figure 5).
Figure 5. Alfred Stieglitz, “Ellen Koeniger,” 1916 (permission of The Getty Museum).
Is America Castrated?
Stieglitz continued to produce photographs of extraordinary quality for three more decades. He also remained committed to advancing the field of photography — writing, organizing showings, cultivating younger talent. Some of his more impactful work took the field in a more abstract direction — his early 1930s cloud series, for instance — but he never strayed far from realism and even social commentary, as one of his other iconic images, “Spiritual America,” makes clear (see Figure 6). A castrated horse, framed by the neat geometric lines of a harness, speaks to the condition of the country just as the boom times of the 1920s Jazz Age gathered momentum.
Figure 6. Alfred Stieglitz, “Spiritual America,” 1923 (permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
A visionary, but one who consistently produced important work and continued to evolve, Stieglitz was an iconoclast who remade photography and brought it into the modern era. Photographers today will benefit from studying his pictures as well as his ideas. My own practice has benefited from returning time and again to this master’s work, taking inspiration from his vision but also learning from his technical precision and devotion to ceaseless experimentation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rick Halpern is an historian and photographer based in Toronto. In recent years he has been writing about the history of visual culture, especially photography, and the way it has shaped our understanding of identity and place. His photographic practice focuses on three main themes: urban life, travel, and food.
January 25, 2021
friends poetry
CJ Suitt
source. Emphasis is mine.
January 22, 2021 05:45 AM,
‘In the Aftermath’ of COVID-19
Chapel Hill Poet Laureate CJ Suitt talks about his inspiration and his vision, “In the Aftermath,” for how the world could look in a post-COVID time when people can be together again.
CHAPEL HILL
While the world hunkered down at home in April from the COVID-19 pandemic, Chapel Hill Poet Laureate CJ Suitt relished the time to create.
He completed a month-long series of self-portraits and poems. He reflected on his art, and when the Black Lives Matter protests erupted in May and June, he reflected again on being a Black man in America.
He had grown “tired of writing poems about black death and black pain,” Suitt said, and he was reminded that “something needs to be put out in the world that reminds us of how far we have come and that there are some things worth holding on to.”
That was the spark for his poem, “In the Aftermath”:
In the aftermath of all this
I’ll sing with you
In a choir stand
On street corners and at my favorite karaoke night
Stroll aimlessly around the mall
Even though I hated the mall.
No one else was talking about that post-COVID world, Suitt said.
“When I wrote that, it was just like I want to envision, imagine what this world might look like, because I’m not hearing that, and I’m curious about what that looks like for myself, for the people who are connected to the world around me,” Suitt said.
“I believe so much in the power of the word that I think that if we put it out there, if I put it out there, we have a better chance of creating it, of manifesting it in the physical world,” he said.
CJ Suitt talks about COVID-19 and his new poem
Chapel Hill Poet Laureate CJ Suitt found inspiration for his poem, “In the Aftermath,” in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 protests following George Floyd’s Minneapolis death.
Activist, artist, collaborator
Suitt has been sharing his observations and experiences publicly since a 10th-grade English teacher at Chapel Hill High School asked him to perform at a Black History Month event nearly 20 years ago.
In 2005, he became a founding member of the Chapel Hill Slam Team, and in 2008, he co-founded Sacrificial Poets, a nonprofit group creating “safe spaces for young people to empower themselves through sharing their stories.”
He has performed for music festivals, poetry competitions, and wrote, co-produced and acted in a re-enactment of the 1947 Freedom Rides. He has become a teacher, taking his art to schools and colleges, correctional facilities and other places where people are trying to find their voice. And he has become a social justice activist.
“I consider myself an artivist — both an activist and an artist,” Suitt said. “I cannot separate my political walk through the world from my artist through the world or my personal walk, and particularly again, as a poet, that’s what poetry is, a vehicle for me.”
He has walked alone and with others, including former Sacrificial Poets members who are now nurses, teachers and music artists.
Nationally known hip-hop artist Kane Smego, a former Sacrificial Poet who played high school football with Suitt, joined him on his journey to “Aftermath.” Durham producer Brad Cook and Suitt recorded the audio in the studio, and Smego filmed the footage.
It was Smego’s idea to send the project to Cook’s brother, musician Phil Cook, Suitt said.
Phil Cook “did a layer of strings. He did some percussion, and then maybe a little horn or flute or keys in there,” Suitt said. “He sent it back, and I was like, yeah, we’re keeping it … turn it all the way up, this is great.”
Growing up Chapel Hill, Carrboro
Suitt’s voice is founded in his native Chapel Hill and Carrboro, giving him a unique view of growing up in “third-world conditions in a first-world context.”
As a boy, he played in the woods and by the creek near his family’s modest home in “Councilville,” just west of Carrboro. They didn’t have a well until the mid-1990s, he said. It took a little longer to get hot water.
“We had to go get water in gallon jugs from the neighbors, and then we would come home and we would heat it up on a kerosene heater,” Suitt said. “We were taking baths in a tub essentially in the living room.”
His first realization that classmates lived a different life was a fourth-grade birthday party when he was amazed to find a pool in his friend’s backyard, he said.
In high school, Suitt was a student and a football player by day and worked with his family at night.
“We cleaned shopping center parking lots when I was in high school … so especially in the fall, I’d get home from football practice by 7 o’clock, have an hour to do homework and we would hop in a sweeper truck at 10 p.m. and go clean parking lots in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, all the way out to Thomasville and High Point,” he said.
Suitt is animated as he recounts the art and oral traditions of his family: an uncle laying down hip-hop beats, his dad rapping Grandmaster Flash lyrics or crooning a Luther Vandross ballad in the bathroom. The “adult” conversations that a “quiet kid” overheard.
“Being able to sit underneath my elders and just hear them talk without filters … I’ve always been fascinated with hearing people talk, particularly people who are older than me,” Suitt said. “Through that, and those ways, I think I just gained a love for the word, the spoken word, in particular, because I was a (poor) student.
On Sundays, Suitt’s mother made sure he was in the pew at St. John Holy Church, where the singsong cadence of Southern Pentecostal ministers and the congregation’s response infused a “soulful gospel energy” into his art, he said.
“Seeing every Sunday, our preacher getting in the pulpit, taking a 2,000-year-old story, wrap it in a metaphor and give it back to people, passionately, and in a way that they can apply it to their daily lives and walk out of that building saying, oh, yeah, the preacher said that today, that was the word,” he said.
There, he didn’t have to check himself, as he did in Chapel Hill’s and Carrboro’s public spaces, or make sure as a young Black man that he was above suspicion, Suitt said. The towns no longer limit where Black people can go and what they can do, and the Ku Klux Klan no longer roams Carrboro streets, he said, but the towns must acknowledge their history and where they still fall short.
That unique perspective led to one of his first locally acclaimed poems, “My Lovely Little College Town.”
In this lovely little college town
Where armchair progressives are a dime a dozen and social consciousness is a verbal state of mind
That really only lies in revolutionary cotton tees, dreads and blowin’ trees
Che is great and we love and try our best to emulate Bob Marley and Gandhi
Chapel Hill
Inspiration, hope COVID-19 loss
Suitt didn’t plan on being a poet, although he did consider being a rapper in a band. He was a struggling freshman at UNC-Pembroke when he decided to skip his final exams and attend the national Brave New Voices poetry competition in New York City.
“That was probably when I made my decision about what I was going to do with my life,” he said.
Poetry helped him reclaim his “power and relationship to the written word,” Suitt said. He started running open mics, and he and Smego coached other young poets, including nationally known Durham rapper G. Yamazawa, at poetry slam competitions.
Just over a year ago, he was asked to be Chapel Hill’s first poet laureate, which gave him new avenues to reach and teach others, and to be “canvas, artist and medium.”
“If I were a painter, I could paint a picture, a portrait, and people could see that picture on the wall, and maybe not know I did it, maybe not know what it took to do it, maybe not feel that energy,” he said. “But for me, it’s very true that when people … hear a piece of artwork from me, they are seeing me, the art and the way the art was made.”
This year, he has been inspired by music, meditation and dance. He launched a Patreon channel — patreon.com/suittsyouwrite — and began work on a new website and a coffee table book featuring his self-portraits.
He collaborated with friends and mentors, including Yamazawa and North Carolina Poet Laureaute Jaki Shelton Green, who praised Suitt’s ability to pay attention to the stories around him and to speak to older folks, as well as younger ones through social media.
You couldn’t find a seat when Suitt and the Sacrificial Poets held open mic events for teenagers in Chapel Hill, she said.
“I like to think of CJ as this incredible forager. He’s in this field, and he’s gleaning from the elders, and he’s putting it in his bag of medicine, and then he’s handing it off to the young person who’s handing it off to the younger person,” she said. “That’s what he does. He gleans his creative earth, and he finds what he needs and what he knows that others need.”
And, she noted, he does it in a way that is respectful and not selfish or arrogant.
“CJ understands that (others have come before him), and he gives that back through his renderings of his respect for the Earth, his respect for family, his respect for community, his respect for other writers, and his respect for elders,” she said. “He makes it very, very clear, and I think we need more young people like him.”
The day before Suitt’s interview with The News & Observer, he was counseling a student through a COVID mental health crisis. The past year also has brought him loss — friends and loved ones taken by COVID, substance abuse and suicide, he said — and by November, it was affecting his art. His second monthlong series of self-portraits and poems only covered the first 20 days, he said.
“When April came … I felt like it was a time when the universe was saying, ‘OK, artist, dig in the well, go deep,’ and I felt like I was pulling up buckets of water,” he said. “Now, I got to Nov. 10 or 12 in publishing self-portraits and poems, and it just felt like I was in the well, but every bucket was muddy water.”
In that time, Suitt held his “Aftermath” list close and the memory of things that gave him strength, he said. He encouraged others to do the same.
I’ll remember the things that brought me strength
The ways I gave and was given to
How I learned to pause
And breathe in the day
How I made a feast of my feelings
And served it up
poem after poem.
CJ Suitt grew up experiencing “third-world conditions in a first-world context” as a poor, Black kid in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, he said. That experience and the social and political reality he sees around him has infused his poetry and his teaching style, he said.
