Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "the lives grown out of his life"

Some of us were lucky to be in the room last night when Cornelius Eady kicked off the inaugral reading of the UC Irvine Black Writers Series by reciting this poem of Robert Hayden:


Frederick Douglass

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

~

And it just went on up and up from there...

Rebel Girl and another IVC instructor were in attendance as were several of Reb's evening fiction workshop students.

Frank Wilderson of UCI's drama department and African American Studies department gave an eloquent introduction, citing his own experience of teaching Eady's work at community college. Later he told Reb taught he had taught at several community colleges for nearly ten years.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Kenyan-born novelist, UCI distinguished professor and director of UCI's International Center for Writing and Translation gave the afterword.

As Rebel Girl departed, she noted one IVC student was getting his book signed by Eady as another two were engaged in coversation with Ngugi's wife Njeeri.

It was nice to be somewhere and feel so welcome.