Windstorms

In the first workshop we focused on Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise’. Participants learnt about Maya Angelou’s life, learnt techniques to create a powerful tone in their work and wrote their own poems in response.

The wind

by Max Levene

For I am the wind.

 Sometimes a soft breeze as I wisp past your branches and your leaves. 

 I tickle the feathers on your wings, my friends as you fly through the air.

I play a role in your life.

Each season I bring a different side of me. 

 Your trunk is strong and tall and you wear your summer coat of green as I whisper to you soon the the autumn is coming.

My whispers become louder and stronger as your coat starts to turn to colours of gold and orange.

My bellows are blustery and intense as I push and pull you.

How do you feel?

Your coat has nearly gone and you are close to bare.

I can see your skeleton, as my voice of harshness grows louder and louder as I bring the cold.

I see your cracks , I can break you.

How do you feel?  

Can you hear me? I roar!

I come with strength and speed, bending you to the ground, as you bow before me I proudly rage all around.

 My voice rages through the spaces I find, lifting and pushing up and down.

I am slowly calming into softness and stillness.

 Until, I am again aroused.

Dust devil

by Joao Godinho

I am the whirlwind in your life,  
and will curb all your ways.  
There's no hope on the horizon,  
I am the horizon, I am the hope.

I am the whirlwind in your thoughts,  
and will break all your wills.  
There's nowhere to go round your fears,  
round and round your excuses.

I am the whirlwind in your body,  
flailing arms, tossing you around,  
until you get to that centerpoint,  
that perfect eye of the rage,  
where the wind is motionless  
and you will finally fathom  
that all it takes  
is to fly
with no wings.

An appreciation: "Still I Rise" - Maya Angelou

by L.M. Lewis

I have always thought of this poem as political and historical, as well as uplifting, affirming and inspiring. I came to it quite late, although I have read most of her books.
 
To me, it speaks of the injustices Black people have suffered throughout history, “the bitter twisted lies” e.g. craniometry, the measuring of a Black person’s skull as indication, of how intelligent they might be. But if a Black person’s skull, happens to be larger than that of a white person’s, it’s being compared too, where does that leave that theory?
The line “You may trod me down in the very dirt” evokes an image of stolen people being made to work in the fields and on the plantations of their captors and oppressors.
And yet, like the dust from that very dirt, “I (they) will rise”, 
        
    They will  not be trodden down.
 
The second stanza speaks of a confident woman saying, ‘this is me, yes I’m loud, audacious, bold and brave and conduct myself as a woman of means, and that disturbs and makes you uncomfortable - but your discomfort is not my concern.
 

Her strength, and self belief, is as inevitable as the moon and the sun reappearing in the sky, as the ebbing and flooding of the tides. She feels a sense of history, and maybe also a sense of responsibility to the ancestors.

Her critics view her as arrogant and insolent, they want, and expect her to behave grateful, subservient and debilitated, to, ‘know her place.’

They will use offensive, degrading and demeaning words to make her feel worthless; but her spirit and sense of self will not be destroyed.

Overall it reminds me of the character Oprah Winfrey plays in the film The Colour Purple: 
    Who is simply and courageously saying
    “Hell, no!” (I don’t care who you are:)

A second reflection occurred to me that this could also be a conversation/discussion between a woman of colour and her white husband or lover. She is calmly saying to him, this is who and what I am, and if you don’t like it, then fuck you!…