I have been thinking lately that I am no longer really what I thought I was, an innernet writer with a small following. You see I’ve been blogin’, I have  marketing people now, official and unofficial, and book stores are actually asking to carry my work. See for the past three years, after I found Independent Publishing, I wrote and really didn’t try to market. I just published and really didn’t try to push my work. I understand a moment and that mine would come so I had to be ready. I simply kept writing and the day never seemed to come when my work “took off,” but today the work seems to be pushing itself.

            I realize that new, different type of people are being introduced to my work with it moving toward stores and my face being a little more recognizable. And I’m sure I’ll have a different type of person stopping by this experience. So a different type of note or explanation about “my story” is in order. One which answers your question, “This brother’s got six books out and I don’t know him?” Succinctly and sweetly.

            I guess I’m simply a writer with an independent company. I say this and feel it in whispered tones because that has been my dream since I wrote my first poem over twenty five years ago, to write what I want and to have others read it. It is not a singular dream, but it is lonely, and far and few people in between keep it. Fifteen years ago, I had a meeting with a friend of a friend who was at a huge editing house doing very important things for these people. I was ecstatic about the opportunity. I thought all the idiotic thoughts any writer would about such opportunities. You know her position? She said to go be a lawyer as she knew my back ground. Even if I was talented, I should be a lawyer, that’s what she told me. Can you believe it?  She had seen one of my manuscripts—Epiphany, the Ghetto Paraball. And while it was, and still is, cutting edge metaphysical, uplifting work, with its own problems, such a reaction? I mean I gave Epiphany to a social worker once and she told me that an entire homeless shelter of Black men wanted to meet me and discuss how it had changed their lives and how it had brought them hope. I turned her down, citing my own humility. I gave her the permission they requested to copy it and give it to friends. But it wasn’t my own humility which stopped me but my own specter of depression. You see it hurt too much to realize that I couldn’t get it published. Editors kept calling it a wonderful manuscript and quoting my great talent, but they couldn’t see a market. Were they right? It sits there in my store front waiting on you.Would you buy it? Will you?

Understand what I’m talking about? Look at what books are bought by us today and what is allowed to be sold to us today by corporate America, because that is what large publishers are, and you find a litany of pimps, hoes, thugs, fools and the foolish. In this space, I refuse to spend time putting us down. I have faith.

            I have faith in us.

            I sold a copy of The Shooter Trial once to a crack dealer on 125^th street in Harlem and he begged my brother for my whereabouts for days so that he could talk to me about it.

            I have so many similar stories but these are the ones which are the ones which touch me most.

            No, I understand my market. I understand us. And I have remained true to my vision. Fully fifteen years ago, an editor at a major publishing house was given a copy of my manuscript by the sister of a friend. She did this of her own free will and of her own initiative. It was the literary version of The Shooter Trial, written entirely in love letters and letters to the unborn son of the narrator. If you are keeping count, this is the second large editor to read my work. The editor loved it and sent me to a huge agent. Essentially the agent tried to “whitefy” the work. He asked that I turn an instant black classic into incredible idiocy by telling the story from the white person’s point of view. It was idiocy because I am not white and could not write a moving first person narrative about race from another person’s perspective. It was an overt attempt to mute my voice. It was a salvo in the war of denial which can be seen often in the critical race wars.  I kept it moving and decided then that I would have no more to do with these editors and their refusal, inabilities, issues or any thing else with my work. I had a vision.

            The heat of the street. The spirit of the Ancestors.

            You see my work is a healing thing. Read it and inexplicably you believe in yourself more; you no longer want to continue living a way which is harmful to yourself; you  start to have faith that this battle on the common front life of poverty, despair, hatred, and greed is winnable. You read my work and you can feel the sun again. You can smell flowers see beauty. It is art. It is what the Ancestors would call Sa Aunk, the stuff of life. All while still being a great story, slick, tight to def, and hot. Like Now. This writing is a ritual, prayer, song. A blessing. It is a glide through the right side of your brain using the left so that you do come out on the other side. So that you know there is another side. My writing can be the light and it can prepare the light…Sa Aunk.

            Without the pimps, hoes, thugs and foolishness, simply being the story, without it being preachy, without it being foolish.

            Down like 4 flats and up like the sun, without the pimps, hoes, thugs and foolishness taking over the voice. Such images are present in my work but they are balanced and critiqued without appearing as such. 

            I have been blessed to write the first African America Heroic Epic with The Book of Becoming Awake Again.

            I have been blessed to write a definitive novel on the position of the African American male as he stood at the end of the twentieth century with Shooter, the unabridged version of The Shooter Trial.

             I was blessed to write the first book on Katrina and the Superdome: Dark Water The New Orleans Protocols, which adds the power of historical analysis and speculative thought to the  landscape of our people's most recent, most powerful painful experience, through the power of Independant Publishing.

            I write so much more than most of us have ever known before for all of us.

            I say again, I am writing so much more for us.

That is my vision.

            That is the life we live.

            I understand my dream, my role, and my goal upon this planet.

            I understand my audience.

            I thank God Divine for this.

            And I thank you for reading and supporting me. None of this is possible without God or you; for no man or woman is an island.

            I have faith in you and will not change my goal or role, no matter what is thrown at me or not given to me. Whether that be your support or Corporate America.

            My name is Kamau Atem and by my Ancestors and Our God, you have my word on this.

            Support me.

            I will support you with this--with Sa Aunk.

            Tell ya people.

            I got faith in you.

Raleigh
February 2007
To How Grat thou art/Oh Lord.
By Salim Washington