Dripping Ink: Light Like a Feather, Heavy as Lead
Exhibit Opens AALBC.com Gallery, June 7th 2009, 2 to 6PM
(Details to Follow)

Dripping Ink: Light Like a Feather, Heavy as Lead
By Marcia E. Wilson
Edited by Sharon T. King

Dripping Ink is a selection of images of some of America’s most influential late 20th, and early 21st century authors of the African Diaspora. These writers use words as a weapon to express their inner power, courage, and purpose. They contribute to the human progress borne out of the mental and spiritual expansion created by books, thereby giving all readers the gifts of vision, inspiration, direction and hope.

I photographed our authors at public functions – from signings to ceremonies –with New York City as a backdrop. I wanted to capture on film the moments when the storyteller and his/her audience at these events became one. A constant exchange of dialogue between writer and audience at these events presented me with many opportunities to present these moments. These events also gave the audience an opportunity to place a face and personality on these spiritual and intellectual guides – the authors.

Many of these images in this series were captured in Black-owned bookstores (Nkiru Books, Brooklyn), churches (Abyssinian Baptist Church, Harlem), book fairs (The Harlem Book Fair), and educational institutions (The Schomburg Library).

I invite you to view these photographs with your minds, hearts and souls. May the photographer and her audience become one. Click!

Dedication
I dedicate this presentation to the small and obsolete Black bookstores, notably the late 20th century pioneers: The Nkiru Center for Education and Culture, formerly Nkiru Books, Black Books Plus, Liberation Bookstore, which had, for many years, opened their doors to Black authors when many others were closing theirs. I also would like to thank the authors who with their tales, poetry and knowledge have positively impacted my life beyond my expectations.

Authors in Dripping Ink Exhibit Include:

The stars look so huge and so close ….At times I feel like I can just reach out and pull a star down from the sky as though it is a breadfruit or a calabash or something that could be of use to us on this journey. From Krik Krak, by Edwidge Danticat
 

My writing reflects my own growth and expansion, and at the same time the society in which I have existed throughout this confrontation. Whether it is politics, music, literature, or the origins of language, there is always a historical and time/place/condition reference that will always try to explain why I was saying both how and for what. Amiri Baraka
 

As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media. bell hooks
 

As she watched him pick up the mango, she marveled, anew at his face. Like reggae, it was a New World hybrid, a genetic mélange of bloods that carried in their DNA memories of the tribes that fought and f***** on the shores of the Americas – Chinese and Arab, English and Scottish from his father’s side; Dutch and Portuguese Sephardic Jew from his mother’s. But the final combination – brown like sun-fired clay; cheeks high and spread apart; nose narrow with a rounded tip; lips wide and fluted – was a vibrant African presence, Yoruba and Akan.  From, Waiting In Vain by Colin Channer
 

Leaving jobs and engaging in other activities to protest what I felt was wrong did not destroy my career. To the contrary, those actions, while not always easy to take, enriched my life and provided me with the perhaps unrealistic but no less satisfying sense that I was doing God’s work. From, Ethical Ambition by Derrick Bell
 

“...I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons…. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began." Dr. John Henrik Clark
 

blackwoman will define herself. Naturally. Will talk/walk/live/& love her images. Her beauty will be. the only way to be is to be. blackman take her. U don’t need music to move; r/movement toward her is music. & she’ll do more than dance. Haki Madhubuti
 

Antigua is a small place, a small island…. It was settled by Christopher Columbus in 1943. Not too long after, it was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslave by noble and exalted human beings from Africa…to satisfy their desire for wealth and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they could be less lonely and empty - a European disease. From, A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid
 

There It Is And if we don’t fight
if we don’t resist/if we don’t organize and unify and/ get the power to control our own lives
Then we will wear
the exaggerated look of captivity/the stylized look of submission.
the bizarre look of suicide/the dehumanized look of fear
and the decomposed look of repression/forever and ever and ever
And there it is
Jayne Cortez
 

“I shut my eyes and tensed my muscles against an urge to vomit. I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves.” From, Kindred by Octavia Butler
 

Lady in Orange:
Our whole body
wrapped like a ripe mango
ramblin whippin thr space
on the corner in the park
where the rug useta be
let willie colon take you out
swing your head
push your leg to the moon with me.
For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide when the Rainbow was enuf by Ntozake Shange
 

This is the time for the creative
Man. Woman. Who must decide
that She. He. Can live in Peace./Racial and sexual justice on/this earth.
This is the time for you and me. African American. Whites. Latinos.
Gays. Asians. Jews. Native/Americans. Lesbians. Muslims.
All of us must finally bury
the elitism of race superiority/the elitism of sexual superiority
the elitism of economic superiority
the elitism of religious superiority
“Poem for July 4, 1994” by Sonia Sanchez
 

...and others