Tayari's Blog: Ladies, Submissions Are Needed

Guidelines are:

Poetry: 1-3 poems
Flash Fiction: 1-3 stories under 500 words
Essays: 1-3 essays under 800 words

All submissions must include a short bio.

The due date is August 1, 2006

Please e-mail your submissions to designsmith2001@aol.com
Please send a $20 money order or check made out to:

Oyster Knife Publishing
500 West Cermak
Box 28
Chicago, Illinois 60616-1859

No submission is eligible for publication without receipt of the submission fee.

KADUMA - a male wrestler enacting a ritual founded in the heritage of his tribe.

These images are based on a long tradition of documenting, adorning and honoring the Black body in general and the Black male body in particular. KADUMA has a place in the global lineage of this kind of work and in the local lineage of Chicago art.

KADUMA - a wrestler displaying his painted body to show he is a champion due to the power of his gods and ancestors.

These images are loaded with power and poetry, metaphor and lyricism, rhythm and gravity. Shadows, paint and artifacts fill these pictures with a thousand words worth of social, political, and spiritual context. Some will conjure memories of Black icons...but deconstructed and revamped, they challenge traditional understanding. These captivating images seek to shed new light on the cultural, spiritual, and political iconography used to engage more than your gaze. These pictures show so many archetypes of our ancient gods and goddesses as well as those devised by modern psychologists and anthropologists.

Look for the man donning a Josephine Bakeresque banana skirt, yet compelling you to see his personal interpretation. See a man portraying an African archetype of the god of the sea. In Yoruba, he is Olokun, the god who looks over African ancestral bones left at the bottom of the Atlantic during the Middle Passage. Check out the image of the brother sporting the imprint of a domino---a piece in the game we call bones . Does he look like this is a game?

KADUMA - warrior men going into enemy territory proudly displaying their black bodies as something fierce, sacred and powerful.

The Black male body is in a constant state of being surrounded by enemy territory. This same feared, hyper-masculinized body is used for commercial purposes to sell a myriad of products...but in most cases their returns are minimal. Search the eyes and postures of these brothers struggling with the sacred part of being art while asserting that they are to be respected. Be pleased to see pictures of Black men smiling like they know they can do more than cause pain...like they know they are blessed because of how far we've come...while knowing how far we still have to go.

KADUMA - Black men proudly exposing their history, their culture and themselves without shame or apology.

Check this collection against the edict of Langston Hughes who wrote in 1926 in The Negro and the Racial Mountain:

We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs... We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

KADUMA - a collection of photographs of Black men owning their portrayals as warriors forged on the streets and in the gaze of these United States. These photographs are not the outsider exoticism or eroticism of a Mapplethorpe. They echo the artistic musings of Black folk like the amazingly talented Geoffrey Holder, who defines Blackness for themselves ... not just as a response to the gaze of the privileged.