Line of Sight

By Michele D. Gibbs

Book Overview

The creative impulse of Michele D. Gibbs comes from many sources: her Chicago childhood as the daughter of Communist parents, her academic training, her political development during the Civil Rights struggle, her career as a Movement analyst and teacher, and her self-taught artistry in charcoal, painting, murals and sculpture. She has produced four volumes of poetry, including two early collections in the famed Broadside Press series edited by Dudley Randall in Detroit, and several critical essays, three of which are collected here. In recent years she has combined her energies with those of her husband George Colman in publishing an on-line magazine, From the Field, in Oaxaca, Mexico, where they both live.

Whether mounting studio shows or producing public art, giving readings or featuring the work of other revolutionary artists in her magazine, Michele Gibbs reflects the spirit of the places she has lived and the people she has known: her view from the block as a young writer, her work as a community organizer, and her participation in political struggle in the Caribbean during the eighties. She brings courage and determination to her efforts on behalf of creating a better world.

Gibbs' artworks mine their African, African American, and Caribbean roots for their expression of folk culture resisting oppression. Her poetry gives voice to the dialects of her people and their neighbors around the world. Her writings on the page are meant to be chanted and sung. This book offers her complex and beautiful gift, a fusion of word, image, and spirit.

Revolutionary art dwells, by its nature, on edges. This is its power. What is presented as intolerable--as crushing--becomes the figure of its own transformation. . . . In Gibbs' work, there is more than hope or faith: it is a calling into being.--Adrienne Rich

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0975348604
• ISBN13: 9780975348604
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: West End Press
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Comin' At Ya: the Straight Ahead writings of Michele Gibbs

There's nothing equivocal about Michele Gibbs. Her vision is clear, her analysis grounded and informed by a lifetime of struggle and study, her delivery one of quiet confidence, her goals well stated and without unnecessary compromise. Chicago born and raised, of a Jewish Communist mother and an Afro-American father who served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish civil war, to prevent a Fascist government from coming to power, Gibbs has known oppression from her earliest years ("...times when the sight of my face / was enough / for bosses to show my mom the gate: / no nigger lovers here": from "to begin"). In later years, after time spent in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and other points in between, she found herself in Detroit, a place she keeps going back to both in person and in thought ("Someday / i'll write / my last Detroit poem ... And until then, / while there is witness to bear, / work to share, /and some people to care - / i'll be there.": from "Someday"). Gone to Grenada in the '80s, to work in the newly elected progressive government of Maurice Bishop ("The arithmetic of justice, / The equation of participation, / The multiplication of mobilization, / The calculus, in sweat, / of transformation... Say it any way you like, / This is a working revolution": from "It's simple, but not easy"), she was imprisoned by anti-Bishop forces when the U.S. army, sent by Ronald Reagan, invaded ("...the heavy handed youths / obeying orders / came at midnight / of the day / they killed you, Maurice, / to come for me": from "Fragmentation bombs: scenes from a war"). Forcibly deported by the U.S. invaders, Michele later lived on the Greek island of Lesbos, and in Oaxaca, Mexico, where we met some ten years ago. Sculptor, artist, essayist, poet and teacher, Michele Gibbs has never given up the struggle to make a better world. In a style that is spare, focused, and calm, she continues to be sometimes angry, sometimes sad, but never despairing or defeated. "Line of Sight", her latest book, contains poetry and essays from previous works and some new material, as well as a large selection of her drawings and sculpture. It opens with the capture and removal of African peoples for the slave trade, and follows their (and her) struggle for freedom, equality, and justice.