Tina Cane | September 2020

Tongo Eisen-Martin

Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again!, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, Someone’s Dead Already, was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book Heaven Is All Goodbyes was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets Series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award.

Tina Cane: I wonder how you started writing poetry and who your influences were?

Tongo Eisen-Martin: The first poem I wrote was in elementary school in response to a Langston Hughes poem, I believe the poem titled “Harlem.” I remember this natural ease I had with putting a line together. Or more than ease, my mind seemed to split into a few different voices that were creating lines by committee. The overall feeling was almost physical. Without making any pacts with myself or even imprinting poetry onto my identity, in retrospect, I did feel a shift in at least what I would understand to be the journey of my relationship to reality.

Gil Scott Heron was influential because he wasn’t even a different category of art. He was just another one of the greats who would come up on my mother’s mixtapes. There would be “Stepping Razor” by Peter Tosh, Nina Simone’s rendition of “Pirate Jenny,” then “Whitey on the Moon,” and then Aretha Franklin singing “Spanish Harlem.” The Last Poets were in rotation as well. They are in my DNA for sure.

Hip Hop was always at the front of my mind. Bay Area rappers who really pushed their craft. Too many to name; but Rest In Peace Jacka, Mac Dre, Tupac, Mr. C, Hit Man, Coughnut.

And those like the emcee, Paris, who always pushed a political line.What East Coast emcees did in the golden age; the South also of the golden age.

My brother, Biko Eisen-Martin, influenced me. He wrote brilliant poems at a very early age. He had a poem called “Ascension” in which he’s describing himself being lynched. He concludes the scene with this line: “they just couldn’t see that this tree was really hanging on to me.” He also had a poem that began “when I am an ancestor, my dust will arise become one with the sky, ever present, iridescent drops of air / I will be everywhere / the burning stare of sun / the broken neck of man hung / the tradition of songs sung / I, Song’s son / a psalm’s creation”

He was channeling heavy energy. In a way he was the first-born, showing me how to swim in a new world; to be a lightning rod of sorts for history, cause, and ancestor while playing with the improvisational math within a moment of language.

The first poet that my brother and I saw in real life was Marc Bamuthi Joseph. What I remember most was his ability to bring a galaxy or cosmology to a moment that automatically dwarfed all competing hegemonies in any room. And he walked through life this way even when not on a microphone. He had a profound effect on us.

The Nuyorican Poets Café raised me. Too many to name. Rest In Peace, Keith Roach.

Then I went away from poetry. Came back to the Nuyorican later and needed to be raised again. Jive Poetic and Mahogany Browne schooled me.

Partners in crime I had along the way. Joyce Lee, Joseph “Sun” Hernandez, Jamal “Tenth” Felix Spann, Lakeya “S.L.A.P.” Morris, Richard “Rich Story” Robinson.

Saul Williams blew my mind. Patricia Smith.

I came to the GOATs late; but Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Roque Dalton felt like a permission when I read them. Permission to do whatever comes to mind. To really stretch to the edge of your craft. The boundaries of language.

I would also have to credit John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Mingus on and on in no order of power.

I pull from all of these people and am constantly looking for more beings to pull from.

Cane: I can’t remember how I came into contact with your work. I saw you in a video speaking your poetry somewhere. I do remember kind of breaking apart and open from it. It had a strong impact on me, and I knew I had to experience it in person at some point. I definitely felt some of those influences you name coming through, but your voice is inimitable. And as I remarked later, when we read together in Providence, you don’t recite or perform your work; you seem to channel it. What’s your writing process, and how has the sharing of your poetry taken this form?

Eisen-Martin: Writing and sharing in many ways have been two different meditations. When I am writing, I give my neurotic tendencies more reign. Because there is so much more of a committee or small protest in my mind when I am writing, I let fearful voices contribute to the process. The picket line’s job is to produce lines that push the potentials of language, or at least my potentials. Within every word, or a couple of words, there are several potential worlds of meaning and association. Really, as many worlds as I have even a little experience with. Almost like (my infant’s understanding of) string theory; a world vibrates and few words are the observable point of that vibration. And groovier still, within a line, the vibration of multiple worlds cooperates to produce a collective observable and almost living representation of social, even cosmic understanding. These worlds can be both of material content, but also pattern of logic, or mathematic realities of language, etc. So, there are these great potentials to excavate, but again it is a process that is grating for me to experience because I let anyone come out to play, including negative mood.

When I am sharing my poetry, the meditation is much different. I am basically relaxing into the various voices that might take over my train of thought and reducing their implication. To where self-talk becomes the observation of energy. Second for second attention paid to the sensations in my body. I also pay close attention to the words of the poem, giving as many of them as I can their due. As artists, we are wise to look at ourselves as vessels. Something comes through us for sure. And so, we do well when we figure out the internal architecture of a healthy vessel. We are a vessel of the universe talking. Even groovier, though, is that we are also a vessel of the universe listening. In a way, even more front row than the audience because you are right there with your voice. So, also figuring out what is the internal architecture of a vessel of pure listening (ironically?) is crucial for the presenter. I wandered into this conclusion watching musicians who just seem to be more affected than anyone in the room by what they are playing and this is probably my primary objective when I am sharing poems. Quantum front row.

Cane: “And so we do well to figure out the architecture of a healthy vessel” is an astounding and accurate way to capture what you do and how you deliver it. It is also, to my mind, a prescriptive for a healthy society, which brings me to We Charge Genocide Again!; the curriculum you wrote and which I have been reading and thinking about. How would you describe this project—how it came about, and what you envision for its use?

Eisen-Martin: We Charge Genocide Again! is a curriculum I wrote to accompany a study of extrajudicial killing of Black people that my mother wrote called “Operation Ghetto Storm.” The study found that a Black person is killed in the United States by a police officer, security guard, or vigilante once every twenty-eight hours. In fact, it is probably once every twenty-four hours, but in cases where the race of the murdered was not explicitly given by police, we did not count them. We found that there is no geographic sanctuary in the United States. North, East, South, West; rates of murder of Black people are institutionalized. We also found that of the killings, only twelve percent of the cases were a situation where a police officer’s life was (allegedly) in danger. The objective of the curriculum was to give an ideological framework of the extrajudicial murder of Black people. Get into the ideological ingredients of the United States and what extrajudicial killing of Black people points to: perpetual domestic war against nonwhite people

Cane: So much has been said about how writing and reading poetry and fiction cultivate empathy. Empathy seems to be an essential but often missing ingredient with regard to America’s character and culture. In my own community work, I’ve occasionally thought about offering poetry workshops to police officers, so that they can explore self-expression and cultivate empathy and self-interrogation. I’ve resisted though, because it’s seems piecemeal and daunting—given the structural nature of the system’s failings. I try to put my resources and energy in young people, who are less entrenched in a particular world view and who possess, perhaps, more potential. As I read We Charge Genocide Again!, writing prompts such as:

Look at this photo of the white-shirted sergeant and imagine him saying: “We are at war.” Then “Write the thoughts of the 5 officers he is addressing...
and
Write pieces that begin:
6) Says Trayvon Martin to me...
(yesterday I wrote a poem using #6 )

These exercises attempt to get into the mindset of officers—which, if we flip the script, is the type of training exercise that would benefit police in learning how to interact with the communities they serve—people of color and vulnerable and marginalized communities, in particular. It’s crucial to teach young people about the history and dynamics of white supremacy, but what about officers?

So much of what Americans suffer from, on multiple levels, is a failure of education, a lack of critical thinking skills. I don’t mean that in the formal sense—in terms of the system (although, yes)—but with regard to understanding American culture. What, to you, is the most urgent aspect we must address in regard to the extrajudicial killing of people of color?

Eisen-Martin: Well, the ruling class seems to be skating free in this moment. We hear calls for abolition of everything except them. The reality is that as long as this society is organized around the maintenance of their hegemony, there will always be monopolized violence and massive inequalities. The tragedy of it is that we know there is actually no reason to not move towards an enlightened society in which we nurture human rights, expression, and curiosity. A new world is ridiculously possible; but a minority of the world’s population want to keep playing God; and the mass imagination has conformed to insane social and productive processes that make the world more and more uninhabitable (biologically, politically, and otherwise).

Cane: The “tragedy” is indeed that “a new world is ridiculously possible,” and yet largely economic structures keep most populations around the globe “in check.” This is not a uniquely American problem. Recently, we’ve seen the Black Lives Matter movement inspire communities around the world to scrutinize and challenge abuse and control of marginalized people. If this is a human problem, what role can contemporary poets and poetry play in addressing it?

Eisen-Martin: Yes, it is a human problem; the entire biosphere’s problem as a matter of fact. Contemporary poets are going to have to put in some time away from the page. We have to take all of our sensitivities to the various nuances of reality, and see how our gifts contribute to political formations. No one can just be a poet, educator, or or even just be a good friend anymore. We have to all be critical protagonists in the transformation of societies in all capacities regardless of talent or interest.

Cane: I agree. And yet I find there is a feeling of helplessness with regard to the scope of the problem, the depth of its roots. Extrajudicial killing is but a symptom of a disease, which is an ugly facet of the human condition—one that we must contain and correct, but that is endemic and sometimes seems insurmountable. Poetry is one way to explore this—is, perhaps, part of the process.

I wrote a poem yesterday using your prompt, Says Trayvon Martin to me, in which Trayvon calls me a thief. It has to do with a realization I had that once I became a mother, I began to feel that all children are mine—not that they belong to me, something more in line with kinship, perhaps even more so with their mothers. When any child dies, grown or otherwise, my mind and heart reflexively leap to the mother—her situation, her loss, what it entails and means.

I recognize that this response is insufficient when we are speaking of political and structural change—which is why, in the poem, Trayvon calls me a thief. Still, I think there is a kernel of shared humanity within what might be perceived as emotional projection. Part of that projection stems from empathy, the lack of which lies at the heart (lessness) of extrajudicial killing.

During the recent and ongoing global pandemic, I walked a lot and sometimes thought about the concept of radical acceptance. I’m thinking now about radical empathy as a measure that must be taken. It sounds revolutionary, given the current climate which has validated and emboldened open hatred in many forms. But I’m also thinking about your poetry which, when I first heard it, provoked a radical response in me. Not solely because of its content—some of whose themes we touch on here—but because of what you do with language, how you splice life into lines that are jarring and beautiful. It strikes me that your poems are filled with urgency and a sense or need for reckoning. It strikes me that the world also feels this way to me these days.

I’m wondering what your experience of the pandemic has been and what you are seeing.

Eisen-Martin: Greatly appreciate your kind words regarding my poetry; honored that my craft is held in such a high regard by someone as talented as you. I did not suffer anywhere near the species of loss that millions of people suffered (and will suffer). But the pandemic worked me over to a certain personal extent. It became clear that maintaining a decent level of discipline and centeredness was really a twenty-minutes-at-a-time operation. Without the tether of social interaction, cowork, and art coproduction, my to-do lists got completely away from me. Sobering to say the least.

The structural response to the pandemic reveals the genocidal character of powers that be. Instead of lessening (what would still be crimes against humanity) profits; they would rather sacrifice millions of lives. In 1948, the United Nations defined genocide as also: “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Sending people back to work. Sending people out of their houses period is genocide. Instead of subsidizing the cost of living for some months; they would rather kill millions of people. That means that we cannot look to any controllers of social, political, military, and economic realities for any semblance of sanity.

When William Patterson, Paul Robeson, and W.E.B. Dubois (among others) went to the United Nations in 1951 to bring the charge of genocide of Black people against the United States, one of their arguments for global intervention in the social realities of the United States was that, as evidenced by Nazi Germany; a society with genocidal practices at home inevitably takes its show on the road. Further, practices evolved on the road become institutionalized at home. With the pandemic; with extrajudicial killing; with the coming economic depression; there is just simply a mountain of unnecessary death. Baby boomers were still sweeping fast food restaurant floors to survive and will be sweeping again. At least 120 people have been murdered by police since George Floyd. Forty percent of jobs lost in the pandemic will not be recreated. People still choose between food and medication. Food deserts and book deserts. A patriarchal everything. A homophobic and transphobic everywhere. And for what? A neurotic reality in which even the wealthy are happy only as long as the duration of whatever their fix is. So some people can feel like action heroes for a day and destroy lives indefinitely. Enough is enough.

Cane: Enough is enough. Indeed. And yet we’ve been here before. I was thinking about initiatives like the Kerner Commission of 1967—an aspirational undertaking, but a great American failure in that the country opted to invest in law and order rather than in communities. It was a refusal to act on psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark’s observation and prediction that affluence and justice cannot coexist. Incredibly, after electing our nation’s first African American president, America has been ruled by the most literal embodiment of what you aptly call the “neurotic reality” of our culture. Where to go? I’m with you that poets need to act beyond the page. People need to act in ways that are new to them. It’s not enough, as you say, to be a good friend.

How about you take a moment to answer a question you wish I had asked?

Eisen-Martin: A groovy place to go is always inside. Healing the internal contradictions within ourselves; within our formations; and within the mass experience. No matter what stage, altitude, or tide of the struggle; the resolution of internal contradiction is what makes liberation inevitable and irreversible. Healing internal contradictions begins with evolving social, even cosmological analysis for people. And poets play a crucial part in that healing as art puts reality in an expanding perspective for those who would humor it. AWP

---

Tina Cane serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she is the founder and director of Writers-in-the-Schools and an instructor with the writing community, Frequency Providence. Her poems and translations have appeared in numerous publications. Cane is the author of The Fifth Thought, Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Once More With Feeling, and Body of Work. In 2016, Tina received the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry, from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and she was named a 2020 poet laureate fellow with The Academy of American Poets. She is also the creator/curator of the distance reading series, Poetry is Bread.