Morphological Confetti

Mental health. This has been on my heart for many years concerning Americans in general, but it is especially crucial in the African American community because some of us have accepted the myth that it does not affect us. News flash: IT HAS ALWAYS AFFECTED US! When examining it from a historical perspective, there are countless narratives from the Antebellum era here in America of African Americans exceeding a psychotic threshold of no return. For example, there was the fugitive enslaved woman, Margaret Garner , who when cornered during a siege in 1876, butchered her children to prevent them from returning to slavery. The narrative was so terrifying and compelling that writer, Toni Morrison, based her novel, Beloved on the event. Even though Nat Turner attributed his actions to being under the direction of the Almighty God, what was his mental state? I could go on with countless stories, but the bottom line is that mental health should be taken more seriously, and it shoul...

Photograph: Erhan Dayi / Alamy/Alamy Note: This is a post that I wrote 10 years ago on writing. When I read it again, I realized that the same feelings are true 10 years later. I wouldn't change a thing. There is still power in the pen! It is a peculiar thing… this desire to pick up the pen. Perhaps, it is born out of the desire to interpret or create life through the people that we’ve met or people that we’ve imagined. Franz Kafka spoke of his torment in writing and how difficult it was to produce a story at times. Ralph Ellison would write for years just to produce one American classic, Invisible Man. Zora Neale Hurston continued to write long after her celebrity had faded; there were dozens of manuscripts found in her personal trunk after her death. This congenital impulse in me was conceived through the Black oral tradition. My grandmother, Eunice, was the family griot. I would listen intently to the stories that she would tell me as a child. These were stories passe...

"And it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect...." Author: Toni Morrison ( Bluest Eye , 1970) Toni Morrison's words sounded off in my head like a siren when I first read them. They were also reiterated in Black Star's (Mos Def & Talib Kweli) lyrics for Thieves In The Night . The words speak truth about human behavior and who we really are. Do you ever think about what you would do if no one could see you? According to Bismark, "our character is what we do when we think no one is looking ." It certainly makes me question my character especially in my most vulnerable moments. Are we good beings? Am I a good person? I think that most of us are guilty of not being such good people. There are few among us who would not do...