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for my son Daniël
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The Last Poets are
Jerome Huling / Omar Ben Hassen / Umar Bin Hassan
Felipe Luciano
Gylan Kain
David Nelson
Charles Davis / Abiodun Oyewole
Alafia Pudim / Jalal Nuriddin
Raymond Hurrey / Nilija Obabi
Suliaman El-Hadi
Don Babatunde Eaton
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This was always, and remains
a foreign land. And we are
undoubtedly, the slaves.
There is some music, that shd come on now
With space for human drama, there shd be some memory
that leaves you smiling. That is, night and the way
Her lovely hand, extended. The Star, the star, all night
We loved it
Like ourselves.
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THE TIME HAS COME
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AUTUMN
Prologue
He remembered the exact day: November 11, 1979. It was a Thursday afternoon. He was in Ameja’s place, a swanky apartment on the eighth floor on Columbus Avenue. He looked outside. It was raining gently. He stood in the living room, watching the drops trickle slowly down the window, zigzagging their way over the glass. Outside, the streetlights were already on. He saw the trees in Central Park, the vibrant spectrum of yellow and green and red and rust-brown. The wispy, watery clouds up above and the pale orange-yellow sunlight trying to break through. Even now, twenty years later, he remembered every detail of that depressing view. As if everything stood still. The glossy reflection of his face in the windowpane. The lights of the cars and taxis down below, melting into one long glistening image, a fading flash of light that nestled into his memory. He had never seen New York like this before, the city as an abstract painting, frozen in his gaze. The city as a perfect reflection of his state of mind. He felt calm. His head was clear. He heard the soft hum of the furnace. It was as though he had spent his whole life working toward this moment. Everything he had been through up till now, all the violence, the commotion, the love affairs, the sex, the disappointment, the successes, drained from him and left him empty. That is how he felt: as though he was ready to fall, fall as deep as he could.
Ameja was out. She said she’d be late, that she had to go to Harlem for business and that he should wait for her. The burned, bitter smell of crack cocaine wafted into the living room. Zaid, a prominent Nation of Islam preacher, was in the kitchen. You could always find him at Ameja’s. ‘Come on, brother Umar, you gotta try this, it’s the next level,’ he had said, with that whispering, conspiratorial voice of his. ‘It’s better than sniffing, it’s heaven on earth.’ Of course, he never said this when Ameja was around. Ameja had forbidden him to smoke the stuff. She would give him as much white powder as he wanted, as long as he didn’t smoke it. ‘That’ll be the end,’ she said. ‘I’ll throw you out.’
He was clean that afternoon. He had shaved and showered and put on one of the white silk dress shirts that Ameja had bought him from her cousin on 125th St. Ameja bought everything for him. Brooks Brothers suits, a fedora, shoes, cocaine. And he gave her sex.
He recalled their first encounter, one night a few months back. It was the premiere of Suspenders. His first play to be staged. It was about a black and a white man stuck in an elevator in an office building on Wall Street. Larry Fishburne played the lead. There was an after-party and Larry had introduced him to Ameja. Ameja was tall and slender and her hair hung past her shoulders. He wondered how she got it to stay so smooth and glossy. Her skin was unblemished and chocolaty.
‘So you’re the famous poet,’ she said, and he heard the irony in her voice. As though she knew he hadn’t written a poem in years. He worked as a cook in a diner in SoHo, was married to Malika, and had three children. They lived in a small apartment in Clinton Hills in Brooklyn.
‘Good with words. I’ve got your records at home … Haven’t played them for years.’ As she spoke she measured him up, eyeing him from head to toe. ‘Wasn’t your name Omar?’
He laughed. ‘Umar,’ he said. ‘Umar Bin Hassan.’
It was as though he escaped from his own life that night. The theater, the applause, the lights, the attention. It was so familiar, so gratifying. Brooklyn seemed light-years away.
‘I want to hear your beautiful voice in my ear,’ she whispered as she leaned over, offering him a glimpse of her breasts. They went to her apartment. They snorted and screwed until the sun came up.
He watched the clouds slowly dissipate above Central Park. Twilight colored the sky pink and purple. Only now did he really notice the street noise. The agitated honking of the cars, the wail of the sirens, the monotonous roar of the traffic. But the noises remained at a distance, reaching him in waves. He looked down below, saw umbrella-wielding pedestrians hurry along the sidewalk; they were almost like puppets scurrying into the subway. The asphalt glistened under the streetlamps. He saw the row of taxis waiting at a red light; they seemed to jostle like excited children. The longer he observed the tumult on the streets, the further away he felt himself drift. He had no idea what to expect, where he would go, what would happen to him after this afternoon. The only thing he could do was yield; every muscle in his body was relaxed. It was a relief to finally give in to the gnawing, hollow feeling in him, a dark, perplexing desire. As though something was waiting for him. As though he was holding something back. This was the real reason he was hardly ever home. A few weeks back he had taken Malika and the kids to Coney Island. It was a Sunday. An unusually fine day in October. They had picked up his eldest daughter Amina at Queenie’s and then went to the beach. It was sunny and warm. The light was white and misty, and from the boardwalk you could barely see where the water stopped and the sky began. The children went on the merry-go-round. They ate ice cream on the beach. He listened to the clear sound of their excited voices, saw how Amina fussed over the little ones. Amina had just turned eight. He looked out to sea, a thin, light-blue ribbon in the distance; he wanted to play with the children, had brought a ball and tennis rackets, but for one reason or another he couldn’t get close to them, as though he was observing them, and himself, from a distance. Malika didn’t lose sight of him for even a moment.
‘Talk to me, Umar,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘You know what I’m talking about. Those suits. The shoes. You can’t afford them. What’s up?’
‘Nothing, not a thing. A little windfall, that’s all.’
‘You can’t snow me with a bit of coke, you know.’
‘Is that what I’m trying to do?’
‘I don’t know.’ She looked the other way. He saw her disappointment. He felt like a traitor, but not because he was fooling around with Ameja. Ameja had nothing to do with it. Even when he had sex with her, when he let himself slide along with the warm flush of the cocaine and whispered gentle, sexy things in her ear, drove her crazy with his words and his tongue,