#Aja Monet

[jackoshadows]

Esperanza Spalding wore a keffiyeh and Aja Monet carried a watermelon purse in solidarity

#Esperanza Spalding #Aja Monet #Grammy Awards #Palestine

[garadinervi]

June Jordan, Apologies to All the People in Lebanon (Dedicated to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983), in Living Room. New Poems, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, NY, and Chicago, IL, 1985, pp. 104-106 (plus Aja Monet Reads Apologies to All The People in Lebanon, 2017)

#graphic design #poetry #book #june jordan #aja monet #thunder's mouth press #1980s #2010s

[padawan-historian]

Auntie Aja Monet speaking truth into streets and stars 🗣

#our world #black lives matter #ecosystem of white supremacy #end apartheid #solidarity with palestine against apartheid #flowers and freedom for palestine #aja monet #cite black women

[inhernature]

#surrealist #blues #poet #aja monet #tiny desk #spoken word #good company #jazz #npr music #why my love #weathering #castaway #black joy #the devil you know #poetry #black tradition #Youtube

[mixdgrlproblems]

mixed race grammy nominee's 2024 pt 1

#biracial #mixedgirls #mixedrace #mixedgirlbeauty #mixedchick #mixedgirlshoutout #mixed #mixedgirl #multiracial #victoria monet #olivia rodrigo #ice spice #doja cat #drake #coi leray #queen sheba #aja monet #nicki minaj #esperanza spalding

[higherentity]

#aja monet #poet #writer #lyricist #activist #black #aja

[mtsidqenu]

- Aja Monet is an incredible poet. I'm thinking of a better way to put it, but just go listen to this entire piece-set from her and see for yaself. "when the poems do what they do".

#what makes you feel Loved? #Love #Aja Monet #poetry

[houseofpurplestars]

Who will unruin this generation

#aja monet #poetry #music #free palestine #free gaza #i stand with palestine #resistance #palestine #decolonization #free sudan #free yemen #free lebanon #free drc #free hawaii #land back #Spotify

[roselungs]

we are

inspired by Mahmoud Darwish

years of a sun loving us, solitude is in the wrist of a magnolia tree, hung or lynched in a rose-throated croon of liberty and justice for all except blues people living in the smoke at a crossroads, what really happened that day robert johnson brought his guitar to meet an evil of all hues play with magic and be ready for it to play with you some folks fear death others know better fear the devil don't tell no soul to spite dying we all have to go someday or another death is a family member you hear of but never met until y'all meet some things is meant for tellin other things just is what they was

i have faced worse things than being forgotten tho you call me woman whom you do not know i am a daughter of sisters of pillaged offerings an afterlife of secrets scores of lustering light i summon you bravely beside me marching onward move not for reasons but love any law that deviates from this is as cruel as it is ancient let your words be soothing terrors never mind what was written we will rewrite it an idea of freedom is all we know

our inheritance is to lift one another we shift into a gust or bristles between strands of hair ashes of breath raging in quiet what land is ours to toss and turn over if not our bodies, the dunes across chests the legs all roads, arms a meadow of marigolds

we survive and regret surviving we are descendants of the end we see the end fences, barbed wire, stone walls, and iron gates do not impede truth. nations can not foresee our being

here in this vessel of marrow and sweat having made it across the bayous of a dark mother's womb and all that tried her pushing through treacherous attempts at our lives fear not what of me resides in you a shawl of waiting hankering to be felt what ails is what ails

wild visions leave doors unlocked dazed veterans returned from combat, injured arms slung close to chest, loyal to a beat or nub. i am a country within a country retire rest a while woke and whirring, my beloved we take to the streets as a sort of rain descending atop roofs of all those who make laws to define the absence between us peculiar spirit who aspires for such things, to possess a people what sin hunts hearts? the birds, the fish, the cattle the islands of what is kept sacred. to nurture is to resist. in all forms we heal. we must work the land before we make claims to it what endures the body is the body when we left our mother's belly we did not take any land only thing we took was the weapon of her smile and the elixir of her love.

—aja monet

#poetry #aja monet #free palestine

[burlveneer-music]

aja monet - when the poems do what they do - the poetry hits, the jazz backing from top players is a bonus

aja monet’s poems are a work of gravity. A surrealist blues poet, storyteller, and organizer born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, aja won the legendary Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam poetry award title in 2007. In 2018, she was nominated for a NAACP Literary Award for Poetry and in 2019 was awarded the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award for Poetry for her cultural organizing work in South Florida. Her work moves, constantly, between origin and outcome, allowing them to exist in converse. In her debut album when the poems do what they do, releasing June 9 via drink sum wtr, we glimpse her indefatigable commitment to speak. Those thematic origins of this album at times center around Black resistance, love and the inexhaustible quest for joy. In when the poems do what they do, aja monet appears as a woman of letters and storm, her poems do not roar in pentameter - but rather in storm surge because, “Who’s got time for poems when the world is on fire?!.” And this work isn’t one to pull apart into one liners, these are poems of things felt. There is a fullness here that can’t be encapsulated in even the boundaries that language offers. aja is joined in effort on this album by musicians Christian Scott (trumpet), Samora Pinderhughes (piano), Elena Pinderhughes (flute), Luques Curtis (bass), Weedie Braimah (djembe) and Marcus Gilmore (drums). Together, creating music that is insistent and unrelenting. When you finally reach the end of this album, you are left with a similar feeling you get when heartbroken, the gravity of barrelling back down to earth, sopping wet with tears, out of breath, overcome with love, despair, hope, and all too aware that all of this, is over far too soon. When the poems do what they do, they do absolutely everything. 

#Bandcamp #aja monet #poetry #hip hop #jazz #female vocal #soul #folk #brooklyn #2023

[airbrickwall]

#aja monet

[inhernature]

the ghosts of women once girls

by Aja Monet

somewhere a little girl is reading aloud

in the middle of a dirt road. she smiles

at the sound of her own voice escaping

the spine of a book. she feeds on her hunger

to know herself. she has not yet been taught

to dim, she sits with the stars beneath her feet,

a constellation of things to come.

as if a swallowed moon, she glimmers.

her head wrap rolls out in a gutter, bare feet

scat the earth, the ghosts of women once girls

make bridge of the dust dancing behind her,

she decorates the ground in dimples

she stomps suffering out the spirit

hooves drumming the earth in circles

she holds gladness in her mouth

like a secret teased out of a giggle

joy like her sadness overflows

she is not the opinions of others

she is of visions and imagination

somewhere a little girl is reading aloud in the middle of a dirt road.

she smiles at the sound of her own voice escaping the spine of a book.

she is a room full

of listening, lending herself

to her own words

somewhere

a deep remembering of what was, she survives all.

(Source: Poetry in Voice includes lesson plan for students!)

#writing #poetry #feminism #aja monet #the ghosts of women once girls #girlhood #Island Scribe #Thank you Simone #Love #childhood #transformation

[asteticas]

WORD TO AJA.

#AJA MONET #AJA #MONET #ASTÉTICAS #ASTETICAS

[seoul-bros]

Jazz Friday - Aja Monet

I'm always late to the party but I get there in the end. Just discovered Aja Monet and the album "When the Poems Do What They Do".

Here she is performing The Devil You Know last November at the Lodge Room in Los Angeles.

“The Devil you know, taxes the air we breathe, privatizes the water, profits off homelessness, strangles the land and injects hormones in animals, rapes the people and rewards the rich”

Now this is good stuff but check out the short film on You Tube and you will be even more blown away.

I am a big Gil Scott Heron fan and when I first saw her Jazz is Dead performance I immediately thought of him. So it is reassuring to see him referenced in the film.

Here he is performing Whitey on the Moon and you can see that The Devil You Know takes up many of the same societal issues. Not a lot has changed in America in the last 50 years. In fact the possibility of a more equal society seems even more distant in 2024 than perhaps it did in 1970 when Whitey was released.

The radio station KCRW included the album in their 23 best albums of 2023 saying it is a refuge from the endless scroll of mindless content. A deep dive into an ocean of feeling. Monet wields words like a weapon, igniting passion that moves the listener to new levels of understanding.

The album is also is nominated for a Grammy in the Best Spoken Word Poetry Album at this years ceremony on 4th February 2024.

Post Date: 05/01/2024

#aja monet #when the poems do what they do #the devil you know #gil scott heron #whitey on the moon #jazz friday #Youtube

[soundgrammar]

Listen/purchase: black joy by aja monet

#Aja Monet #Bandcamp