Geoffrey Philp's Blog Spot

December 3, 2009

Mark Your Calendar: December 12, 2009

Book Launch: Reception and Lecture: Eroticism, Spirituality and Resistance in Black Women's Writings by Donna Aza Weir-Soley

Come out and bring your friends and family for good Caribbean food and an exciting discussion on the nexus between black female sexuality and spirituality.

Dr Donna Aza Weir-Soley will be reading from her latest book, Eroticism, Spirituality and Resistance in Black Women's Writings, on Saturday, December 12, 2009, at Broward South Regional Library/Broward Community College campus, 3700 Pines Blvd., Pembroke Pines.

Praise for Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women's Writings.

"In Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women's Writings, Dr. Weir-Soley successfully undertakes an analysis of how black women writers, beginning with Zora Neale Hurston in her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God, have used overlapping narrative depictions of sexuality and spirituality to recast the denigrated black female body and rewrite an empowered and fully actualized black female subject."

~Candice M. Jenkins, Associate Professor of English, Hunter College, City University of New York

"Weir-Soley speaks with an authority that comes from real knowledge of, investment in, and attention to the details of the African cosmologies and textual complexities she unearths."

~Carine Mardorossian, SUNY-Buffalo

"The most original and significant contributions are the often brilliant readings of Morrison, Adisa, and Danticat. The work is riveting, both methodologically and critically."

~Leslie Sanders, York University

Saturday, December 12, 2009

1:00pm - 4:00pm

Broward South Regional Library,

3700 Pines Blvd., Pembroke Pines

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December 2, 2009

Black Virgin - Modern Art Exhibition - Paris

For your Christmas pleasure, another view of the Virgin, who has appeared under various guises, most notably at the Chartres Cathedral. We know her in the Caribbean as Erzulie.

Related Post: "Erzulie's Daughter" @ peony moon

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December 1, 2009

World AIDS Day 2009: "not another aids poem."

Back in the early eighties when “not another aids poem” was written, our family was living in fear. My wife’s cousin, Hernando, was dying and nobody knew why. The doctors tried everything—interferon and other drugs used to treat cancer—but nothing worked. Then, we learned he had been diagnosed with AIDS.

My wife, who was pregnant with our first child, wanted to visit Hernando in Colombia, not only because she loved him, but because he was one of the first in our families who gave us his support. I still remember sitting in a small bar in Bogota, drinking aguardiente, listening to Andean music, and Hernando explaining to me why the preservation of indigenous music—the music of his people—was important.

In the end, my wife and I decided against the visit because we still didn’t know how AIDS was transmitted. Was it airborne? No one had any answers.

Today is World AIDS Day and we now have more information about the disease, but we are no closer to a cure. And it still doesn’t diminish our guilt and the pain that we feel at the loss of a life that was brilliant and filled with cariño.

Rest in Peace, Hernando.

not another aids poem

(for hernando)

when did the tissues,

the invisible barrier between cells,

break and send nuclei,

intent on their own destruction,

alerting an armada of antibodies

in your body's mutiny against itself?

i ask

because it's the only question

that i can understand,

with which i can console myself

while i mutter

a new alphabet of ddc, azt, ddi...

and you become a mottled ghost,

in a gown, transparent as

your skin, a part of the bed,

a network of tubes,

roots i cling to

that connect this life to the next