“…I remember coming out of the undertow,

the oceans, the seas, the electricity, the explosions,

billions of us crashing into waves,

then blown away into memory.”

--Sekou Sundiata, from “Philosophy of the Cool”

I was working on the edits for The American Poet Who Went Home Again, a book of creative nonfiction that explores the last two decades of my life in the city of Savannah, Georgia, when I received notice from Louis Reyes Rivera, that our brother poet Sekou Sundiata (August 22, 1948-July 18, 2007) had died the previous day.

I wanted to avoid sliding into thoughts of things like how grateful I was that another poet, named Sistah V, had introduced me to Sundiata’s lyrically incandescent works several years ago. Nor did I want to consider how just last night my former ESSENCE Magazine poetry editor, Angela Kinamore, and I were on the phone talking about how poets in our country are finally growing into their own with the laborious bloody birth of this new twenty-first century.

That growth is something in which Sundiata––through his recorded works, staged productions, classes he taught, and sponsored events––had played a major role for the past three decades. And I didn’t want to think about how useless now were any plans I had entertained to one day embrace this son of Harlem (New York City), Music, and Poetry to thank him for igniting his soul like a comet and sending it to blaze such powerfully soulful and brilliant pathways through contemporary poetry.

What I needed was to find my copy of his CD, The Blue Oneness of Dreams, play it loud and celebrate his celebration of the beauty of words empowered by musical traditions like jazz, the blues, and gospel. Listening to him could help me to better hear my own voice and measure with greater accuracy my intentions and purposes as a writer and human being. So listen I did, and from his Harlem-smooth voice on the very first poem, “Shout Out,” received precisely the kind of affirmation––of his poetic vision as well as my own––for which I had hoped:

“Here’s to the best words

at the right place

at the perfect time

to the human mind

blown up and refined.

To long conversations

on the philosophical ramifications

of a beautiful day.”

--Sekou Sundiata, from the poem SHOUT OUT

At first read, it might seem like a respectable enough yet ordinary mantra for a poet of Sundiata’s cultural integrity. When looking at the man’s life, and learning something of how he literally transformed his battle with kidney failure into a work of performance art, how he transformed whatever social, political, spiritual, and biological agonies that visited his life into small hymns of triumphant creative action, or how he gathered struggling poets beneath his literary wings and helped them learn to soar by sharing his own heroic flight, that mantra becomes a quietly spectacular self-contained revolution.

There’s no way for me to overlook the startling ironic parallel that while I was writing about one kind of journey back home, Sundiata was performing a different kind. The realization did not allow me to wallow in self-pity at all. It instead pushed me to honor something I had nearly forgotten and of which Sundiata now reminded me. As human beings, we are born to undertake journeys that may end as easily in brutal infamy as they may in quiet honor. As poets, we are reborn to discover the meanings inherent in those journeys, and through the music of our words, the rhythm of our determination, and the shimmer of what we claim as our souls, we try to help the world to do the same.   

by Aberjhani

7/20/07