Basquiat, Three Ways
1
Dear Jean
Because you painted in the nude, they learned to love. From Brooklyn to Bellevue, along city sidewalks, cold-hearted New Yorkers turned to tangerine tarts and warm brandies with hints of pumpkin. With every fallen leaf, luce scarves reeked of renovated raspberry and poo clementine and highlighter blue—the vévé tints and shades of a mighty mind capable of turning Poplar trees into puzzling oils at 200 million dollars a pop!
You taught them to give head
the respect it deserves / red
them your poems through your paints / mixed
hot as a hung jury in Harlem. You’re welcome!
You showed them what the color chalk could do, articulated why madder is the perfect crown, why wedding clothes have no place in war. You created dangerously, punctuating with your hair, with your eyes, with your fidgeting and wondering and looking away. That Capricorn smile carried things that she knew nothing of. How does she know who you welcome? Is she the gatekeeper of ghosts? Does she know who you meet in the night, apple knife stabbed into writing desk, warehouse windows shot with blood-yellow on the third floor of a Brooklyn flat keeping watch over the moon? Good looks are about good company. Hot company. Sea goat green? Forget Gopnik, shorty. Hyppolite’s got nothing over you. Believe it or not, they all know you can draw.
2
Visual Vampire
Edwidge Dandicat is fascinated with ghosts. Create Dangerously, published nearly a decade ago to national acclaim, sketches a treasure map for the civic pupil, outlining where the diamonds lie: creation myths, missing, murdered and maimed immigrants, apologies, speculation, declarations, confessions. Eloquent and provocative, each essay seems to validate the notion that ghosts indeed are needed, that ghosts are necessary, that anyone bold enough to fidget and turn away from such ghosts are foolish.
Dandicat is a reporter who writes with dogmatic clarity: "I am not a journalist." Her position is proven. She is more like a painter, more like Jean-Michel Basquiat than she knows. She is observant, thoughtful, upright, generous, and intelligent. Her former fear of flying parallels his former fear of dying. Basquiat, after all, looked a great deal like Michael Stewart, a young black artist who soared during the downtown New York club scene in the ‘80s, killed in cold blood by police.
Yet from a certain vantage point, Dandicat is there, Canon Powershot C Series in hand, on bended knee, snapping hard as a “forgetting tree,” studying his perfect little mouth yon ti moman, caped and weltered, looking for heart-shaped ghosts.
3
Obnoxious Liberals
Get your head out of the bag, woman. Lower your shears. I am not in need of a haircut. There’s no need to slash and burn simply because you can not own me. I am not for sale, novelist. It’s 1982. I’m chained up in America—not Haiti, girl; this nut graf is not about religions I didn’t grow up practicing or priests of which I have no relation. I am not a thing by osmosis, so stop making bone-headed assumptions. You and him both.
I’m tied to two pillars, gorgeous asbestos above my head. When I die, am I going to Haiti heaven? Does having brown skin automatically make me the descendent of slaves? Is that why I should believe in Vodou—to have a tangible place to go, to rumble about the “ancestral homeland” of my forefathers before they were “taken” and brought to the New World as “slaves”?
IMAGE: ACRYLIC, SHARK OIL, BRICK; BY MISTER O.L.
Right.
How old is this belief anyway? About 700 years at best? OK, fine. So, tell me this: What did you fine people believe about death BEFORE you were taken as slaves? OK, cool. So, believe in that. Acrylic, oilslick and spray painted, this is your muthafuckin’ painting speaking, woman!
[Slams ATM machine]: “Y'all gon make me act a fool / up in here /up in here! / Y'all gon make me lose my cool / up in here / up in here!”
Stop the ghost work, lady. Stop the sneak dissing. Tell the plain and simple truth. I got no respect for writers who make up shit on their own people just to sell books in NYC—a white warehouse full of enslaved trees? Bitch, please.
And now a word from our sponsor...
Mic check 1. Uhm, thank you Mr. O.L. We don’t normally allow such spicy language here in Chef City. This is a family friendly event and we pride ourselves on a spirit of camaraderie. No ballyhoo. No skulduggery. No dilly-dallying. Just good clean fun surrounding recipes that sing. Got that, mister! Now smile nicely for the cameras.
Goodnight.