[8] The E-Drum by Niama Leslie Williams NiamaNitewriter@aol.com I really don't want to write this ode. Cause the brotha came to town and didn't like my shit. Mentioned me in his report, the element of his list serv I most look forward to, but misspelled my name and grouped me in with a bunch of other spoken worders who he said were "[not] as bad as many I have heard at open mikes, and at the same time there was no one who really, really knocked me out." So by all rights I should be in Louisiana with my never been South ass lookin' fo' him. To do some damage. And I admit; it took some emotional doings for me to get back to readin him. Emotional doings. But like that step fellowship I belong to, I never really left. Cause see, he done done what no other force on this planet has been able to do. Let me talk to you for a moment about the L.A. Times. My parents only knew daily and Sunday. Wasn't nothin else happenin in my house. After my daddy left, the habit still continue. We all three readers, my brothers and I, cause every time we looked at our parents they nose was stuck in 20 newspaper, a book, or a magazine. There was also the element of escape. I mean, incest, divorce, physical abuse; that a lot of shit to deal with on any average day. I dealt by doing what my parents had done; picking up a book. And so words have meant salvation to me. When I started dealing them, gathering them up, tossing them, shelling them out for sometimes money, it was no little thing I was doing. This was tradition, heritage; hell, my mother one of the few people got Bernie Casey's book of poems in her library, and all three of us read it. Look at the People; I never forgot the title or the cover. I still prefer the cover of a hardback to a computer printout; there's just something so tactile, so permanent, about a book. But this man, this man' list serv has gently seduced me into putting down the newspaper. At pivotal time. A time when we cannot count on traditional news outlets to give us the real story. I don't find Yasser Arafat's words on why he will not cease the Palestinian struggle in the L. A. Times. I do not find Michael Moore's delightful and terribly sarcastic essay on whiteness there. I did not read the Afghani woman's essay, sharply on the heels of 9/11, in its pages. I read all of the above on my screen. On e-drum. For free. www.topica.com/lists/e-drum. I am put in the midst of a jivin' discussion between Kevin Powell and Charlie Braxton, me, the budding Black Studies scholar, by Kalamu, the humble, quiet, stealthy perpetrator of neo-griot. I understand griot, even neo-griot, as literary terms. What Kalamu does with them via his traveling computer and portable theory on new media mystifies me. I know that he speaks to the young, puts the tools, the power, the idea of expression, the idea of access to the tools of expression, the responsibility of recording expression, in their hands, cooks it into their brains. I think he has cooked mine also. Because I was a woman of the page. Only now do I look back on my life and understand that if not for the funny papers and the tv guide, I would have no subscription to the newspaper. Those are the only two things that keep my hand in. I have gone from a heritage of daily and Sunday to Sunday only, and saving about four sections of that Sunday only, none of them the front page. I have seven five-shelf bookshelves in my house, each packed to the gills with books. Books are the first thing anyone who enters my sanctum sanctorum notices. I want to someday have tomes with my own name on the spine. But I have relinquished print for something else. I spurn four, five, six and eleven for this strange new creature I do not fully understand. It brings me Mardi gras and festival in Brazil from the lips of a barely twenty-something. It brings me calls for submissions that Poets and Writers would never think to run. It brings me the pulse beat of life from places I cannot yet afford to visit, connects me to writers and outlets that even if I had a check to write, I could not afford the multiple subscriptions. All of this for free. This e-drum, this place, is a powerful tool because it has helped me turn my back on a media that has been co-opted, that does not tell the Blackman's truth, or the Latino's or the Asian's. Or the 20 Afghani's for that matter. It gives me something the corporate media, for that is what they have become, no longer seems to understand: balance, balanced reporting. I see, when I check it once a week, 100 to 150 messages at a time, my own perspective reflected back through someone else's pen. This is no small thing, this turning away from Channel 7, the one station we always looked forward to growing up as children because it came in the clearest. This turning away from my hometown paper. No more will I scan its pages with love, reminiscing about Hipshot Percussion, Gal Friday, Bert's Beanerie. I will hand down to my children printouts, and the occasional clipping of Boondocks, the only strip that now brings a smile when I flip to the funny pages. We are in an interesting time, a time of a closing of the borders. They have not erected steel and fencing, but they have corralled those suspected of murder and they commit civil injustices against them. We live in perceived freedom. One day, some day soon, they will come for us. We need to sound the drum, the e-drum. It is the only thing that can get into all of our houses, the only thing that can cross all of our screens, one of the few things that is still free. Close the comic book. Discontinue the Wall Street Journal. Turn to your screen; fight to keep it free; beat the tightened skin. The e-drum is all we have left. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Reprinted from the Amateur Computerist Vol 11 No 2, May 1, 2003. The whole issue or a subscription is available for free via email. Send a request to jrh@ais.org or see http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------