angelina jolie and brad pitt

intend to adopt a child from every continent. "We're already picking out the next country," she said, to People Magazine.

Haven't they heard of catalogs? Or online shopping? Neither makes for a good photo shoot. But it does spare your current infant adoptees the stress of being carted round the orphanages and refugee camps of the world:

Just ignore all the journalists, sweetie, and pick out a cute new brother to take home.

Or here's another suggestion. Perhaps it hasn't occurred to them that North America is a continent too. I hear there's a fine crop of picturesque orphans down in Louisiana.

scary things happen

when your mutant tech-geek gene is activated. Like you suddenly know that MacWorld is happening in San Francisco. You even consider taking a day off to check it out.

Is there a global cache where pre-tech-geek brains go into storage? Can I get mine back, if I start to miss it?

in my next lifetime

I will be:

1) a dancer

2) able to parallel park effortlessly, in two smooth turns and a twiddle of the steering wheel

3) capable, like my housemate Diana, of lucid conversations while brushing my teeth, without a single dribble of toothpaste down my chin.

love poems: part 3

My friend Kenny says that his ambition as a poet is to write poems that are Marxist theory. I think my ambition as a poet may be to write political essays that are actually love poems.

Everything Arundhati Roy (pictured) writes, reads like a love poem to me. She does not separate her heart from her politics. Her humanity from her brilliance and piercing analysis. June Jordan's essays are love poems. So are some of Michael Ventura's. And several passages by Edward Said.

When I began to write Shilling Love, I wanted to expose the facile trivialization of the word love in American society. To explain how soft words are a luxury bought with hard currency. After I'd performed it a couple of times, I began to describe it as a love poem. Now, I think it may be the closest I've come to my ambition above - without setting out to do anything of the kind.

I tell people Eater of Death is a love poem.
For the Women of Project Pride is a love poem.
This Is How It Feels is a political poem.

haven't seen Jesus in a bagel yet

but the paving slab on the sidewalk outside my house is cracked in a way that outlines an eerily accurate map of Africa.

It Must Be A Sign.

for all you liberation theologists out there

Ok then, just for my goddess-daughter, Araminta, whose baptism I will attend in June. And her parents, Pablo and Andrea, who I know will appreciate this. That's if they don't tell me it made the rounds of liberation theology hipsters 2 years ago.

What's the difference between Pat Robertson and Hugo Chavez?

Chavez is a Christian.

love poems: part 2

So I've been thinking about love poems, and my transition over the years from hardline to curious and flexible.

First, I noticed my own inconsistency. Some of the collections I turn to most frequently, especially in times of political and personal challenge, are love poems. Adrienne Rich's Twenty One Love Poems continue to teach me what a true love poem looks like - and how inseparable it is from a true political poem.

Marilyn Hacker's Love, Death and The Changing of Seasons, was a talisman book in my 20s. It got me to seriously consider trying formal Western verse structures - but only if I could start a villanelle as she does, like slipping into a conversation:

Lie down beside me if it's good for you
I need to know my need is no disgrace;
I won't stay if you don't want me to.

and wind it with her skill and dexterity through the lovely 3-line rhyme schemes to its ironic triumphantly-anticlimatic finish:

But we avoided that scenario.
A sense of humor is a state of grace.
And I am here and I am going to
Lie down beside you, and be good for you.

I'm figuring out, through this multi-part blog posting, my own politics of love poems. Thinking aloud on the blog - with favorite lines of favorite poems in my head.

blogging curfews

I set myself a rule at the start of this week: I can't blog until after 10pm.

Now I may have to set myself another: No blogging after midnight, unless you can sleep in the next morning.

I'm wondering how long it will be before I break both rules, and hide the fact by altering the times of the postings.

Are there twelve-step programs for bloggers?

NEWSFLASH! NY Reading Jan 23

Just confirmed a staged reading of work-in-progress from Migritude in New York on Jan 23rd, at SALAAM Theatre.

Full details on my calendar

Please come out, if you're in NY. If you're not, please forward to your friends and connections in NY. Tell them there will be wine and samosas after the performance :-) And they get to meet SALAAM's artistic director, the legendary Geeta Citygirl, named one of the Top 100 New Yorkers of the Year in 2004 by the New York Resident.

I'm on radio this Thursday

I'll be on KPFA's Apex Express, between 7 and 8pm, talking about Asians in East Africa, my upcoming trip to Nairobi, and sharing excerpts from Migritude.

KPFA radio, 94.1FM, 7 - 8pm

the gods are smiling on you

when, in a single day, you:

1) Get through 6 tasks you'd been procrastinating on since 2005

2) Fit in a hike with a friend, on your favourite trail, as the sun sets over the Bay and the moon rises from the hills behind you

3) Find the screw-on top to your hot water bottle, that's been missing for weeks

check out

the changes to my homepage. You can now click anywhere on the page to get to Migritude.

Huge thanks to Vivek Prabhu for making the changes, D. Ross Cameron for the photo, Sterling Larrimore for the design, Kim Cook for the concept.

if you read only one blog

read this one. I mean it - skip mine, skip everyone else's.

Riverbend is a young Iraqi woman who's been blogging since 2003 about the real lives of ordinary Iraqis under US occupation. Her first year of postings was published last year as Baghdad Burning

She makes me cry, and laugh, and rage, and marvel. Her will to continue, her ability to go on seeing, recording, in the face of more horror and destruction than most of us will ever see, humble and inspire me. Here she is on 2006:

What does the ‘6’ symbolize? How about- 6 hours of no electricity for every one hour of electricity? Or… 6 hours of waiting in line for gasoline that is three times as expensive as it was in 2005? Or an average of six explosions per day near our area alone?

On watching the video of white phosphorus in Falloojeh:


I finally worked up enough courage to watch it and it has lived up to my worst fears. Watching it was almost an invasive experience, because I felt like someone had crawled into my mind and brought my nightmares to life. Image after image of men, women and children so burnt and scarred that the only way you could tell the males apart from the females, and the children apart from the adults, was by the clothes they are wearing… the clothes which were eerily intact- like each corpse had been burnt to the bone, and then dressed up lovingly in their everyday attire- the polka dot nightgown with a lace collar… the baby girl in her cotton pajamas- little earrings dangling from little ears.

Some of them look like they died almost peacefully, in their sleep… others look like they suffered a great deal- skin burnt completely black and falling away from scorched bones.

I imagine what it must have been like for some of them. They were probably huddled in their houses- some of them- tens of thousands of them- couldn’t leave the city. They didn’t have transport or they simply didn’t have a place to go. They sat in their homes, hoping that what people said about Americans was actually true- that in spite of their huge machines and endless weapons, they were human too.

love poems: part 1

I used to be pretty hardline about love poems. I took the position that a love poem is really a private gift poem, written specifically for one person. It shouldn't be inflicted on the world at large, because it wasn't written with any intention to communicate with the world at large.

The genre of love poetry, I sneered, generates more banal dreck than any other. Being in love makes people who can't write, think they can; and people who can write, suspend their critical faculties. Attention to craft flies out the window, as does awareness of a larger world beyond their own romantic passion.

So I didn't read love poems in public. Didn't consider them a part of my poetic output, or body of work. I wrote them for people, to people, gave them as gifts, and forgot about them. Poems I wrote about loving someone, that challenged sexism and homophobia; poems that engaged with the politics of who's allowed to love whom, and how, and why, were OK to put out.

Photo: Matt Fitt

Shailja in the Oakland Tribune

Nice photo of me in the Tribune's coverage of yesterday's One City One Book Launch.

Bloggers who rock

Minjung Kim. Not just because she's one of my biggest fans, although that helps :-)

Really though, her blog is one of my inspirations for what a blog can be: the doctoral dissertation to my crayon drawing. Every minute I spend on it expands my knowledge of the mysterious swirling subcultures of the blog universe, and the tech galaxies I didn't know existed. She cracks me up with her pillow talk. And gilds my vocabulary with words like bloggerati and aud/vlog.

Two Amazing Kenyan Women

who just happen to have been at high school with me, in Nairobi :-)

Kagendo Murungi, NY-based filmmaker, founder of Wapinduzi Productions. Her first feature-length film, Sunshine Boutique, celebrates the value of African life and the leadership of African women of all sexualities around the world.

Wangechi Mutu's work is on exhibition at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art until April 2nd. Her images vibrate beauty and horror, as they explore the way tides of history have been enacted on women's bodies.

Image: Wangechi Mutu
Misguided Little Unforgivable Hierarchies, 2005
Collection SFMOMA, purchased through a gift of The Buddy Taub Foundation,
Jill and Dennis Roach, directors
© Wangechi Mutu