In "Fall and Response" Mary Weems writes about Black life from a perspective filtered through a collective cultural lens which moves seamlessly from the personal of love, marriage, motherhood, suicide and loss to the political of poverty, mis-education, police violence...the daily effect of being Black, a woman and a descendant of slaves in a continually racist America which falsely promotes the idea of diversity and inclusion publicly, when what it wants is to conserve a status quo where the majority of Blacks remain on the bottom of the bottom one hundred and fifty-nine years after the official end of slavery.

Mary E. Weems’ “Fall and Response” is the evidenced labor of a poetic inquiry, a form of writing that uses the art of poetry as a critical praxis of knowing and coming to know; a method of lyrically documenting experience and discovering possibility; an incantation in the rituals of remorse and reviving the dead. Her play in the title of this mesmerizing collection of poems riff (for me) on the African American cultural tradition of call and response; a dialogic interplay, a communal summons and recognition, a reinforcement of the ties that bind—both in the history of chattel slavery and the sankofa of remembrance, in which we reach back to retrieve what we have forgotten to sustain, in order to propel us into our own potentiality carrying roots of ancestors. Her take recognizes the fall (as a call) for us to stand up and respond in self-affirming ways. From beginning to end, she evidences a kind of soul search that the body never forgets—as her poetry reminds and responds, beckoning our participation in our own memory and emancipation.

Bryant Keith Alexander, PhD, Professor of Communication, Performance and Cultural Studies, Dean, College of Communication and Fine Arts, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Mary E. Weems, M.A., Ph.D., is a poet, playwright, author, performer, imagination-intellect theorist, and social/cultural foundations scholar. Weems is the author of more than thirteen books including Still Hanging: Using Performance Texts to Deconstruct Racismm, 2021. Collaborative Spirit-Writing in Everyday Black Lives, 2022 and Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet ,2023) the first two published with Co-Author Dr. Bryant Keith Alexander and the third as 2nd Author with D.C. Hill and D. Callier; Blackeyed: Plays and Monologues, 2015, Writings of Healing and Resistance: Empathy and the Imagination-Intellect, 2012, Public Education and the Imagination Intellect: I Speak from the wound in my Mouth, 2003), five chapbooks, most notably white (Wick Chapbook), and numerous poems, articles and book chapters.

In 2023, Mary Weems produced her first short film “Socks,” based on her play of the same title. To date, “Socks” directed by Ashley Aquilla, and Lonnie El, of Angel Touch Films as Cinematographer, featuring Laprise Johnson, has won numerous Independent Film Awards including five (6) for “Best Short Film.”

CATEGORY       

Poetry, Literature/AFRICAN AMERICAN                                

PUBLICATION YEAR
2024

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