This will be our first interview for the poetry section. We didn’t want it to just be about poetry. We wanted to know who these Poetrs are, what's their inspiration and affiliations with organizations. And for the jump off we have Walidah.

Walidah (The Bad Sista)

GC: Where did you grow up?

Walidah: I grew up on military bases in Germany. I was born in Iowa and I don’t like to claim that so you don’t have to write that in [laughs]. But we moved to Iceland, then Germany, and we lived there for 10 to 11 years. I moved back to go to high school in Springfield, Oregon. I went to college in Portland. Growing up on military bases was pretty crazy, just the education you get about how the military acts in other places.

I lived in Germany and Iceland and I can’t even imagine what soldiers acted like in third world countries. I was in Germany during the Gulf War and I attended military base school. All the kids on the base went to the school so I got a military base education during the Gulf War and there was a lot of intense propaganda that went on then, and we were little kids- 6th and 7th grade. There was no "Maybe this is wrong.” The same indoctrination the soldiers were getting at the time, we got it too. I remember writing letters to a soldier in the Gulf. He was my soldier. I baked cookies, I knitted him a scarf. I don’t know what the fuck he was going to do with a scarf in the middle of the desert.

It’s interesting because kids who are raised on military bases go one way or the other, you know. We have to have some reason to justify what we see. Either we become very pro-military: "Yes sir, no sir, god bless this nation," or we go the other route where we talk about how corrupt the system is and how awful it is and what it does to other nations and what it does to the soldiers.

The soldiers are predominantly black and brown on the base. People are like "there are so many white folks in Iceland and Germany," but on the base most of the kids I went to school with were people of color. That’s where I lived. It’s interesting to see what the indoctrination does to young 18-20 year old people of color who are sent to the frontlines. So that set the stage for my politicization. At 10 or 11, I didn’t think about it but that was in me.

Then I moved to Oregon, an all white environment, there were 10 black kids. I could count us on my hand even if I were missing some fingers. The intense racism that was going on there. You know, Nigger this, nigger that! There was a town near us and there were intense race wars going on there in the high school. All the black and Latino kids got together and called themselves The Browns. Wow, that’s solidarity right there, when you don’t have enough strength on your own.

So being in that environment, I needed to check it out, ask why is this happening, because there had to be a reason. I was always interested in history and I started studying alternative history- Howard Zinn, Ronald Takaki, Lerone Bennett. I was lucky to get an internship at a social justice organization and I started working at the alternative newspaper at the college even though I was in high school. I was 15 and I said, "Hey I would love to work with you guys and I have some experience in journalism." They said cool. They were talking about the Zapatistas, Che Guevara, the Shining Path, blah blah blah ,and I didn’t know who these folks were so I would just sit there and listen and ask questions and they were excited to have a 15-year-old interested in these things.

Along the way, poetry became important. In high school I wrote poetry- angsty crap that high school kids write. I really started writing poetry when I got politicized as a way to deal with the anger I was feeling seeing these images, reading the history, listening to people’s stories. And living in that environment every day, poetry became a way that I stayed sane.

GC: What age were you when you started writing what you call poetry?

Walidah: I was about 15 or 16. It was around the same time that my political activity began. I started doing performance poetry in college. I went to an event in school, a black history month reading by this woman who is now my poetry partner, my best friend, my sister Turiya. Her kids are my god kids. You know I had seen her around and she had seen my poetry and she said, "Oh you have to come out to this poetry slam." I was like, "What’s a poetry slam?” We went and I had no idea what to expect. I read a couple of pieces and I won the first time. I’m a Leo so I love winning. I didn’t win again for months [laughs] but just being in that space was a growing experience.

ThenI got on the Portland slam team and I went to the nationals in 1999 and that just blew my mind. For the next couple of years, I pretty much did performance poetry, slam poetry. I went to the nationals two more times, one time as Portland’s grand slam champion and once on the Trenton NJ team in 2001.

People don’t really read poetry. I’m not trying to reach academics. I’m trying to reach people who can feel it and understand it and who need it. It’s just the most amazing, powerful experience to lay your soul out and open up who you are, and have someone come up to you and say, "You said what I’ve been wanting to say for years." I remember there was this one poem about being mixed and what that means. I did it at a place that was all black and I was really nervous; it was like outing myself. "Hey, I’m mixed and I have some issues!" I was watching the audience and I saw 3 or 4 sistas’ heads going yes yes. All these sistas and a couple brothers came up and they were like, "It was so good to hear our lived experiences said. It was so good to hear you claim your blackness and still claim your mixedness and realize that those two can coexist together and you can still be a political black angry woman and still be mixed." We had this moment where we just cried. That kept me going for another year.

GC: Growing up mixed is different- especially when you have friends of different races and you know you’re being called honky, nigger, spic, Indian whatever.

Walidah: "What are you?" Yeah, I recently went to Puerto Rico with a political punk band that I do work with, Ricanstruction. It was crazy because it’s a whole nation of mixed folks. They all came up to me speaking Spanish thinking I was Puerto Rican. I said, "Wow it’s crazy to be accepted here." I saw this little girl that looked just like me when I was a kid and she was speaking Spanish fluently. That could have been me!

GC: Do you have a favorite piece? Talk about your favorite piece and your inspiration, some of the people, things, events that shaped or influenced you, impacted you…

Walidah: There are definitely pieces that mark the different stages of different experiences. One piece that signifies what I was trying to do and what I’m still trying to do is a piece called The Sky is the Limit. It’s about hip hop being the continuation of the revolutionary movement of the 1960s and 1970s and how it is and is not fulfilling that. And what it means to have an art form that is the continuation of a revolution, because it is easy to get into the mode that I’m writing a poem and I’m spitting it on stage and that’s my job. Poetry, hip hop, and music can be a tool of the revolution but it can never be the revolution. That was my reminder to myself of that.

I like that piece and I use imagery from the 60s and 70s: Che, the Black Panthers, the different radical movements and tying that into hip hop. Looped it with an SP 1200 like the Ho Chi Minh trail. Clearing out the stale empty posturings of this almost lost or perhaps a lost and found generation. Turn the station and find static. The tell-lie-vision spews me back at myself in stereo surround sound surrounded fast closing in hit the dirt or assume the position, makes no difference.

Lately, in my poetry I’m trying to find the balance with the idea that the personal is political. Especially for people of color, our lives are so tied together with our politics. Everything we do is political in this nation and especially for women of Color. A lot of times the outlets we are left to express our politics is through our lives, so how we raise our children, how we laugh, how we engage in relationships becomes extremely political in a sexist white supremacist society.

I’m working on my first collection of poetry that is going to be a full book called War Wounds which mixes the overtly political poems with different poems I’ve written about relationships, family, identity, mixing those together and recognizing that they are all political. Whether dropping bombs in Afghanistan, Iraq, MOVE in Philadelphia- it’s all the same… while still recognizing that even though a relationship is political, it isn’t the same as bullets ripping through a brother’s back from a police officer’s gun. Those poems are necessary.

But I think for inspiration- there are so many inspirations- political, poetically and everywhere in between. My poetry started with reading about history, struggles of every day people. Not necessarily big name folks- though there is Nikki Giovanni, bell hooks-I’ve been reading a lot of her writing lately. And June Jordan is always a love of mine. But you know the Nuyorican poets- in the 70s they had their style of poetry, a combination of humor and painful reality.

Yo- this is how it is but we need to laugh to get through the day or we’ll kill ourselves and each other." So Pinero, Pietri, any of those brothers and sistas.
But it was the everyday struggle of people and reading about what happens to black and brown people in this country. Knowing about that pushes me forward.
And I’m inspired by other contemporary artists. Working on the Ricanstruction album, I just get into the writing zone and I have to write things out. Energy builds up.

GC: Could you tell us what Good Sista/Bad Sista is?

Walidah: That’s my poetry group that I started with my poetry sista Turiya. We were asked to do it when I was in Portland for a black history month. We sat down and just started talking, and realized we had half the poem without even trying. It was a powerful creative process to be part of, and it hasn’t changed really over the years.
We got our name when we went to Seattle to do a hip hop show with our brothas in this dope hip hop group Black Anger. A brotha back stage was trying to mac on us. Turiya was like, "It’s really nice and I really appreciate it that you think I look good but I’m not really all that interested, but thanks…" and I was like, "You need to back the fuck up. Damn." Then he asked, “What’s your group called?” It sprung to us: Good sista/Bad sista.

That has continued to play out in our interaction. Turiya is always the negotiator, she’s the diplomat, I’m the one when you need your guns blazing, you send me in. But that idea- how we go about surviving as people of color. All our survival tactics are valid. And so one day if you need to be a good sista and be nice to make it through the day and get through a situation, it’s ok. And if you need to blow up and go off and be loud and angry –that’s fine. However you need to express yourself- take up the space. And there’s no need to make any apologies for it.

GC: How do you see being the editor of AWOL Magazine fitting into your poetry and other work?

Walidah: AWOL is a political hip hop magazine that comes with a CD specifically targeted to youth of color because they’re the ones being targeted by the military. It’s an anti-militarism magazine but it ties in all the things we go through in life: poverty, police brutality, using hip hop as a voice to give words to pain and struggle we go through everyday. Recognizing that it’s the military that underpins all the ills that affect our lives. Like when they call out the National Guard at our protests or there’s an urban uprising and they send in the military troops. The same way they treat third world communities overseas, the same thing they’re doing to Iraq, they’re doing in Harlem, in Afghanistan.

It’s the same role over and over again and it’s our faces that are on the frontlines, on both sides of the frontlines.
The military’s recruiting kids that are 18, 19, 20. They’re going into middle schools now trying to get the kids- especially young people of color. Because you’re poor and you don’t have any other options. You know, the military recruiters will even say that! "You‘re going to end up on the corner selling drugs, or go to jail, get 15, 20 years, life. Or you can join the military, have a career, travel overseas, visit great counties, get an education, money for college." It’s all bullshit. It’s all lies; most people don’t get access to any of that stuff.

What they do get access to is the brutalizing process they put you through to make you a killing machine. That’s what we’re trying to put forward with AWOL. The military is a killing a machine and they’re training you to be a killer, that’s the reality; it’s not a job training program, not a vocational skill. That’s what people in Iraq are seeing now.

I went back to Portland over Christmas, and I was in the airport. I saw all these soldiers on leave from Iraq. They were all young, mostly brown. I was just staring at them. "You’re going back to this war zone and you’re 19 years old!" "They just lied to you! Took you from the hood to someone else’s hood."

We’re also trying to create a space where conscious artists can put out their music without having to go through this corporate machine. The media industrial complex is like the military industrial complex. Either way, you’re selling your soul and your body to someone else. So we’re trying to create a space and maybe you won’t get paid but we’ll give you a bunch of AWOL issues you can sell them for $5 on the streets. We try to put on shows, try to get you connected. We’re trying to create that space where we’re not relying on someone else but we’re relying on ourselves which is what’s so cool about GeoClan because it’s the same principle.

GC: How does the military and sexism tie in together?

Walidah: On the military base growing up I saw how women were dehumanized. Part of the military process is sexism. It’s inherent. "You’re a pussy, you’re a little girl!" and even worse than that. The Marine’s have a chant about raping and killing and how it’s fun and they want to do it all day long. And that’s something you chant over and over while you’re running for 15 miles straight- so how can it not become part of your mentality? And then they station them in other parts of the world and they give them leave.

They have whore houses set up for men to come and “relieve some stress.” And these are poor and working class women of color who have no other options. Countries’ economies have been devastated by US corporations. This is the only option left. "I can go work in a sweatshop for 15 cents an hour or I can sell my body for $2 an hour.”

Then the mentality is that these aren’t women, these are holes, these are things for us to do. It’s the same way that you start to think about the enemy. You can’t think about the enemy as a living, breathing 18-year-old kid who just wants to go home to his family like you, or you can’t kill him.

I also do anti-prison work with the Human Rights Coalition which is a group of prisoners’ families. It’s prisoner family led, and it’s about figuring out how to make changes in the prison system that will positively affect the folks inside. A lot of times the anti-prison movement is led by activists who have this attitude "we think this is most important for you." It’s really tokenizing, it replicates a classist way of doing things. Because most people who have family in prison are poor, most are people of color. 70% of people in jail are people of color and a lot of the activists are white. So to replicate that system is racist and it is the same thing that the prison system is doing.

The Human Rights Coalition is trying to counter that by letting it be the folks- the mothers that are planning, sisters, daughters saying this is what’s important to us. They’re not trying to turn away from the struggle because their families are in it, their communities are in it. It’s an amazing powerful force to see a group of mothers get together and organize a video showing or go out and pass out information. "You thought you knew about this, but let me tell you some information."

There’s so much stigma around having someone in prison, to see a family member break through that and say yeah I’m a father of someone who’s locked up for life and let me tell you what that means to me in front of an audience is so powerful. To recognize that it’s not our shame, it’s the system’s shame. The system should be ashamed. We should be proud that we’re doing all we can for our family members who are locked up. So that work is important. AWOL supports that work and talks about it.

Most of the options are the prisons or military for people of color as jobs move to sweatshops overseas to exploit third world countries.

With the counter recruitment stuff, we do we try to target that and put out information about the lives they don’t tell you about going into the military. Because the recruiters will tell you anything and when you sign that contract they’ll be slick about it. "Yes we’ll put that in the contract for you. Yeah we’ll write that down. You’ll be stationed in France and you’ll learn computers…" What they don’t say is that at the bottom of the contract, it says, "This contract is subject to change at any time without prior notification to the signee."

Once you sign in, the military’s got you. You’re under the Uniform Code of the Military Justice. We don’t think we have any rights out here with the Patriot Act, just check out the UCMJ. It’s like you’re guilty until you’re proven innocent. During war time you can be shot for anything, desertion, mutiny. Some of these cats in Afghanistan or Iraq, they might want to speak out, they want to do things but they’re dealing with the reality that they can be shot for that.

There’s this brother who’s a Filipino gay man Stephen Funk who came to a political realization that he didn’t want to be in the military. "I joined for the money, I came in here to find myself, to try to find purpose, and this is not what I want to do." And he refused to go. And he spoke up about it. He’s a Filipino and queer brother so the military decided to come down hard on him. And he said that I’m not going to fight your war. So they locked him up and they were going to try him for desertion but luckily they brought it down because all the publicity and people speaking out they brought it down to a UA which is Unauthorized Absence. But he ended up with 3 years in military prison, which is no joke, and a dishonorable discharge which means that you can’t a job after.

GC: Did AWOL get a lot of calls during the recent war
on Iraq?

Walidah: AWOL is partially funded by the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors which runs a GI Rights Hotline. People can call to get counseling from draft counselors or military counselors to get out or to deal with things that happen in the military like racism, sexual harassment. The calls skyrocketed since the war on Iraq. We get 4,000 calls a month from people wanting to get out

GC: Do you do prevention education by going into middle schools and high schools where they go to recruit?

Walidah: Definitely. That’s what AWOL is, a tool. We give away 50% of the AWOLs to kids who are being targeted. We go around to schools all around the country that are in the hood who are poor, who don’t have access to this information and the recruiters are heavily targeting.
Of course we don’t have millions of dollars like the government, we’re working on a shoestring budget but there’s a law called the Equal Access Law that says that anyone has equal access to schools. So if a military recruiter is going to a school- anyone has a right to go in and give a presentation to the same students.

GC: When did you move to Philly and why?

Walidah: I moved to Philly 3 1⁄2 years ago. I was doing a lot of work in Portland around the Mumia Abu-Jamal case. And Mumia was instrumental in my politicization process. The first protest I ever went to was for Mumia. Through Mumia I got more of an analysis of what I had lived. A lot of activists become very condescending towards people: "Well I need to teach you what’s going on." But people live this shit everyday- we know what’s going on. Especially people of color in this country- you know what’s going on. You don’t need to be told the cops are an invading army! You see it everyday!

But what you need is help creating a framework to recognize that the system is telling you that it’s your fault. "That the police wouldn’t have to come into your community if it weren’t so crazy and if you didn’t sell drugs and you weren’t killing each other." It’s easy to say well maybe it is me and maybe we are crazy. But there’s something inside that says that this isn’t right- I know my brother, my sister, my cousin. So Mumia for me was that catalyst, he gave me a framework, helped me make connections.

For more on Walidah check out
Poetryoffthepage.com, and AWOL Magazine