Tourmalines: Beyond the Ebony Portal

Tourmalines: Beyond the Ebony Portal is a collection of poems with a focus on Black history and African Americans, named and unnamed. Black lives are represented as various, colorful gemstones and themes corresponding to the colorful tourmaline gemstones with a variety of characteristics and healing properties. Because every tourmaline is different, one can use the stones as metaphors for the diversity of African Americans who are mixed with people of various origins: African, Native American, European and Euro American, Caribbean, South American, and Asian. This cultural mélange produces in Tourmalines a rich, colorful collection of poetic gemstones.

The themes of the collection Tourmalines include African origins, myths, spirituality, family, contemporary issues of race and poverty, and numerous other themes (threads) that the reader will find stirring and enjoyable. The poems depict the worlds of a colorful, durable, ancient people towering in post modern times, weathered yet proud survivors of cyclones and earthquakes of power and race, floods of oppression, and sandstorms of history.

Understanding the world beyond the ebony portal requires the reader to enter into another way of seeing. For example, on close observation of ebony, one sees the fine and intricately grained surface, designs caused by droughts and fires to make it beautiful beyond comparison. Because things dark or unknown require new ways of looking at and seeing depth, nuances, and spiritual essence, the reader realizes that darkness presents a riddle and challenge of how to see differently.

From the ebony of rich and lustrous old world trees and ancient tourmalines, the reader is encouraged to honor the process of stepping beyond the portals of the familiar world of artistic expression into the evocative details that inform black (life) reality and a tourmaline history.

I invite the reader to walk through the portal of poetry into the black world, into the vision of self, cultural community, history, and philosophy of an African American woman who walks tall, and cradles the bones of Senegalese, Cherokee, Welsh, English, and French ancestors. The journey continues to unfold as I grow through the processes of life, remembering my legacy and posterity. And so it is.