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Somerville Poet Afaa Michael Weaver is a two- time Pushcart Prize-winner and an English professor at Simmons College. His poem “American Income” was recently republished in The New York Times.
Afaa Michael Weaver
“American Income” is part of my book The Plum Flower Dance (U Piit 2007), the first of a trilogy. In the trilogy I have set myself the task of organizing my life experience and my poetry according to what I have learned in a lifelong engagement with Chinese culture, specifically with Daoism as I have encountered it in practicing Chinese internal development, known as nei gong, which includes qigong and Taijiquan.
It was late in the summer of 2007, and I had just returned from Taiwan, where I was studying Mandarin and visiting friends there and in Mainland. I stumbled across an article about a statistical study of the relationship of weight loss to income. It seemed black men were the only ones who could not achieve an income rise after weight loss. I was inspired immediately and wrote “American Income” in my living room.
My references to Chinese spirituality in the poem are an effort to find a place where the entanglement of America’s race problem achieves some clarity for me, which is to say a place where I can understand that injustice, however senseless and cruel, happens everywhere. Our hope lies in forgiveness and compassion.
On a more deeply personal level, the blending of my experience with what I perceive as Chinese culture is about a homecoming. I remain a Christian raised in the deep cultural matrix of an African American southern ethos. The intersections of cultures help me understand hybridity, but I maintain a faith in the grounding concept of a specific home.
Even as I wrote with spirituality in mind I had my doubts, and still feel that while a certain serenity is to be had by spiritual resolve, it remains to take effective action against such weighty racial oppression, action aimed at petitioning for a more genuine sense of humanity through the assertive example of a life lived according to a spiritual conviction.
The Government of Nature (U Pitt 2013) is the second book in my trilogy. The third and final book of the trilogy is entitled City of Eternal Spring and is forthcoming.
American Income
The survey says all groups can make more money
if they lose weight except black men…men of other colors
and women of all colors have more gold, but black men
are the summary of weight, a lead thick thing on the scales,
meters spinning until they ring off the end of the numbering
of accumulation, how things grow heavy, fish on the
ends of lines that become whales, then prehistoric sea life
beyond all memories, the billion days of human hands
working, doing all the labor one can imagine, hands
now the population of cactus leaves on a papyrus moon
waiting for the fire, the notes from all their singing gone
up into the salt breath of tears of children that dry, rise
up to be the crystalline canopy of promises, the infinite
gone fishing days with the apologies for not being able to love
anymore, gone down inside earth somewhere where
women make no demands, have fewer dreams of forever,
these feet that marched and ran and got cut off, these hearts
torn out of chests by nameless thieves, this thrashing
until the chaff is gone out and black men know the gold
of being the dead center of things, where pain is the gateway
to Jerusalems, Bodhi trees, places for meditation and howling,
keeping the weeping heads of gods in their eyes.
– Afaa Michael Weaver
“American Income” from the Plum Flower Dance, by Afaa Michael Weaver (2007) Reprinted with permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
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