He came to Simmons in 1998, after receiving tenure with distinction at Rutgers University. At Simmons he is a tenured full professor and holds the Alumnae Endowed Chair, the first chair to be established at the college and one that is reserved for working writers.

He is the author of 11 books of poetry, a collection of essays which he edited, several essays and articles in various academic and trade publications, and short fiction. As a free lance journalist he has written for the Baltimore Sunpapers, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Philadelphia Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore City Paper, and the Philadelphia Sun. He has been the editor of Obsidian III at North Carolina State University, and the editor and founder of 7th Son Press in Baltimore.

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Oracle of East Baltimore 

Poet Afaa Michael Weaver made his way out of a tough neighborhood, but still feels a sense of helplessness when he returns home.

by Rafael Alvarez

 

Afaa Michael Weaver credits poetry as that which helped him survive Baltimore / photo by J.M. Giordano

The question—naïve and whimsical, as though beauty really can save the world—floats around Afaa Michael Weaver and hard hometown facts at the corner of Lakewood Avenue and Oliver Street where he went to grade school.

What is the bridge that Weaver crossed to transform himself from a factory worker named Michael to a heralded poet, disciple of the Eastern arts—"I am bound by Taoist oaths"—and New England college professor named Afaa?

Honored as the black Walt Whitman of our age (he is lyrical, kind and gentle, even on bad days), Weaver grew up in "the Valley" in far northeast Baltimore where his kin owned a bar called the Apache Lounge.

The area was nice then, back in 1957 when Weaver was six and his steelworker father used union wages to buy 2824 Federal Street, around the block from his school, for $9,000.

Almost sixty years later—decades in which Weaver survived child abuse, three marriages, heart failure, profound depression, and a razor against his throat in a fight over a woman—the neighborhood is holding on but not so nice anymore. How did he survive Baltimore when so many of his family and peers—indeed the neighborhood itself in many respects—did not?

"Creativity," says Weaver, who graduated at sixteen from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute in 1968—the year he remembers a man running up Harford Road with a rowboat on his head, loot stolen from the old Sears at North Avenue and Harford Road during the King assassination riots.

"Knowing I could write poetry was the light inside of me ... what helped me make sense of myself and what was going on around me—the hardest thing for me in Baltimore was cultivating and defending my imagination.When I come back now, I see what I was up against."

A professor of English at Simmons College, Weaver was most recently back home for his sixtieth birthday in November and again a month later to read at the Pratt Library in Highlandtown.

"After I gave the [Christmas] reading, someone told me that young people in town are teaching city kids mindfulness and none of those kids have dropped out," says Weaver, first exposed to the thrill and discipline of martial arts by way of 1970s kung-fu movies. "It's all about the mind; you have to be able to have your own mind.

 

When Afaa (meaning "oracle" in Ibo, given to him by the Nigerian writer Tess Onwueme) was writing his way out of a South Baltimore soap factory thirty years ago, he wielded creativity against a manufacturing culture that allowed his parents to become homeowners.

"Maybe the price Baltimore paid for places like Bethlehem Steel was what factories do to people," he says. "They stamp you into this numb sameness, a dull conformity."

Baltimore's creative class seems to be growing (when your college degree is worthless, why not throw paint against the wall and call it macaroni?) in proportion to the loss of jobs prevalent when Weaver worked at Procter & Gamble and Bethlehem Steel.

Once there was work in Baltimore and to be an artist was the lot of eccentrics.

Now to be an artist or poet in Baltimore—a weirdo, a drifter, a dreamer—is common, but good jobs are scarce.

Is it too harsh to say there is not a poem in the world that might do for Baltimore what Beth Steel once did? No, says Weaver, it is not. 

"The American dream is a house, a decent car, and to be able to send your kids to a state university. My father was able to work overtime, and my mom pinched pennies. That gave us a fairly different life" than what was and is common around many old Baltimore neighborhoods.

Weaver holds an endowed chair as alumnae professor of English at Simmons College, editing and translating poetry and prose both into and from modern Mandarin. In 2004 and 2008, he organized international conferences of Chinese poets at Simmons, the first held outside China.

In a telling anecdote on the mindset of the average Baltimorean, he recalls family members refusing to believe that he could speak the language of Yao Ming. To which he replied: "How would you know that anything I said wasn't Chinese?"

Pushing into his seventh decade, Weaver is contemplating a memoir about the influence of Chinese culture in his life for an upcoming sabbatical. It would have long passages about the city he left at thirty-three, one of heartbreaking memories and geography he doesn't quite recognize anymore.

"I feel a sense of helplessness when I come back home and I'd like to write something to help people understand how to have faith—how to break free of the things that keep you trapped," he says. "The example of my life is what I want to give."