Jayne Cortez
I got the phone call Friday morning, December 28, the young woman’s voice said, “Jane has traveled.”
Jayne Cortez had passed.
One of the strongest poetic voices I had had the privilege of hearing was gone. She was a premier voice of the Black Arts Movement, a creative language innovator second to none. I knew her through her early books but I did not get a chance to see her until I moved to New York. I remember being shocked when I saw her. The “Firespitter”, whose words were often huge, searing, and even, at times, grotesque, was herself petite, fashionable dressed, and quite elegant.

Jayne has traveled:

She was the flaming intelligence who brought us:

through swamps & screams screams
up north
where the El broke off
and the urban nigguh blues
was stomped
right through the piss stained stairs
of the monkey mans wares

Jayne was the tongue on fire who told us:

They’re brooding in Rosedale
with pipe-bombs in their mouths
brooding in Boston
with darts between their teeth…
Brooding with the smell of rat’s piss in their hearts
brooding with the breath of red whiskey in their spit
brooding into madness into death into sheets drying up while brooding brooding brooding brooding
…they’re…brooding with bricks in their baby carriage

Jayne traveled into the livid lies of whiteness, exposing the evil of racism that had been marketed to the world, to us. It was a racism that we sometimes swallowed whole and unanalyzed and then shit out on ourselves.

But Jayne traveled beyond naming the evil
Her poetry took us to the:

THE BRAVE YOUNG STUDENTS IN SOWETO

Soweto
when I hear your name
I think about you
like the fifth ward in Houston Texas
one roof of crushed oil drums on the other
two black hunters in buckets of blood
walking into the fire of Sharpeville
into the sweat and stink of gold mines…
…I think about the old mau mau
grieving in beer halls …
…I think about the assembly line of dead “Hottentots”
and the jugular veins of Allende
and once again how the coffin is divided into dry ink
how the factory moves like a white cane
like a volley of bullets in the head of Lumumba

But Jayne was not addicted to the suffering, she traveled beyond naming the evil. She was a visionary. In that same poem she tells us:

Soweto I tell you Soweto
when I see you standing up like this
I think about all the forces in the world
confronted by the terrifying rhythms of young students
by their sacrifices
and the revelation that it won’t be long now
before everything
in this world changes

Jayne was the change she wrote about, her words woke us up, put us on alert, broke our hearts and reminded us of who we were or wanted to be. The organization she created OWWA took us in. She told her sisters: bring in the young women, go get Maya, the black guerilla girls, light skin-dark skin, I don’t care who they love, GO, travel past bullshit and be post bebop surrealism all inclusive black. Save the trees the TREES! THE TREES! Tell it trees, tell it through the drum, if your drum is a woman why are you beating your woman, why have you let them twist us away from love? She brought us together over the jealousies, conspiracy theories—“please do your art stop arguing, AND for God’s sake”:

Find your own voice and use it!
Find your own voice and use it!
Find your own voice and use it!

Jayne has traveled and left a world of words for us here. I feel privileged to have known her.
Go on Firespitter! Go on!