© paul / Adobe Stock.

“Nigger music,” he said.

He paused and thought deeply for a moment. “Yeah, that’s what we do: full on nigger music. It’s fucking great.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to say so I leaned into the couch and mumbled something like, “That sounds fascinating. I’ve got to come see that sometime.”

San Francisco hipsters filled the corners of the dark apartment. Outside, a light rain came down around the city. Conversations oscillated between fashion and music. I could have talked to so many people but I had chosen this skinny musician who had tried to French kiss me earlier. In that moment, he seemed like a true artist to me—someone who created, revised, destroyed, and rebuilt in an effort to understand the world. And, he played nigger music. Was it a travesty or a triumph that this skinny, five-o’clock-shadowed white guy had so comfortably described his band’s style of music to me, a skinny, five-o’clock-shadowed black guy, as none other than “nigger music”? He apparently didn’t know what else to call it. He said that his rock band, Mutilated Mannequins, constructed lyrical diatribes on racism, pairing them with gripping art-rock freak-outs. He was so sincere, calm, and honest. His eyes honed in on me, his confidence unwavering. His philosophies unfolded: “We are doing important shit, man. Rethinking the whole world. The whole fucking paradigm.”

He went on describing his music. After some time his words echoed listlessly like the distant pitter-patter of rain on the windowsill. I thought about punching him in the neck. I was in a state of existential shock. Lifting up from my body I considered that I needed to spend fewer nights like this: twenty-six years old, going to work, making music, barely sleeping, and then going out just to hear someone talk about nigger music. The age-old question lingered: Would it ever be possible for a nonblack person to throw around the word nigger in a nonmalicious sense? Does the weight of such a word truly vary with context or is it a shotgun shell whenever it gets fired into the air? And, damn, sometimes it takes a minute to figure out how they’re shooting. Former NAACP representative Julian Bond said that the second civil rights movement will be harder because the WHITES ONLY signs have been taken down. Yet their shadows remain firmly placed to doorways and water fountains. How do you challenge a ghost when you can’t even touch it? Read More

Rev. Pedro Pietri, ADÁL, 1990

On an unremarkable street corner in East Harlem, diagonal from a big gray battleship of new housing development, sits the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, which everyone calls the Centro. This fall, I went to the Centro to meet Rojo Robles, a student in the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino cultures department at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, who had offered to show me the library where the archives are kept. We paused in a fluorescent-lit hallway to observe photos of leaders from the Puerto Rican diaspora, many of whose works are preserved at the Centro. Among them, mustache drooping over a smile, was Pedro Pietri, cofounder and poet laureate of the Nuyorican Movement in downtown Manhattan, who died in 2004—and whom Robles is studying. Together, we were visiting his collection.

These days, most people don’t remember Pietri. Not just a poet but a playwright and early performance artist, he spent the AIDS era hand-packaging his “condom poems”: bits of verse along with prophylactics in tiny manila envelopes, which he distributed during performances at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and other galleries, bars, and public spaces. Both artist and activist, he used his work to make the AIDS crisis visible while also providing protection to a community on the margins. As we reevaluate the horror and official inaction that surrounded the crisis, his actions are of particular interest. But they were ephemeral. The scraps that remain have been tucked away in the archives for decades.

Now, they are being revived. In November, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative published text and images from the condom poems as part of a new series of chapbooks. For ten years, the poet and scholar Ammiel Alcalay and his students at the Graduate Center have been trawling the archives of mid-twentieth-century poets like Pietri. Each year, using the print shop in the basement, they work with a team at the Center for the Humanities to publish a selection of the strange treasures they find. “A lot of the writers we think we know, seventy or eighty percent of their work is still in the archives,” said Alcalay, a gentle, gray-maned eccentric who uncovers letters, lectures, syllabi, translations, and other marginalia. Without the work of his team, it might all remain buried.

Read More