Take a Stand: Art Against Hate: The New Raven Anthology

Raven Chronicles Press, for those not familiar with this important Seattle-based literary project, began in 1991. The amazing Phoebe Bosché has been the editor of Raven Chronicles Press and published a regular magazine for many years, but she now focuses on anthologies. These provocative collections of visual art, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction bring together writers with many voices. I treasure and constantly re-read these books. They are not books that you read cover to cover, but books for when you have a few minutes, or half an hour, and you feel like expanding your focus, certainly crucial at the moment.

Take A Stand, Art Against Hate first stuns us with its cover: a detail from a mural, a collaboration between AICHO (American Indian Community Housing Organization), Honor the Earth, a nonprofit environmental organization, and Mayan artist Votan, with the assistance of Derek Brown of the Dine’ or Navajo tribe, and members of the community. Ganawenjiige Onigam (Caring for Duluth in the Ojibwe language): A New Symbol of Resilience in Duluth, Minnesota, is a declaration of the issues facing Native American women such as violence, sex trafficking, and environmental racism. Primarily, however, the enormous portrait of an Ojibwe woman is a symbol of resilience, the bandana covering the woman’s face is a reference to women who participated in the Zapatista uprising in the Mexican state of Chiapas in 1994, as well as the water protectors at Standing Rock. The jingle dress worn by the woman in the mural has special significance to Ojibwe people. A woman dancing in her jingle dress is thought to possess great powers to heal.

But on to the anthology itself divided into five sections, “Legacies,” “We Are Here,” “Why?,” “Evidence,” and “Resistance.” As one of the editors points out, some works could be in more than one section, and in each section the anthology sets up a type of call and response between the different voices.

Before each section are often five separate quotes from major thinkers like James Baldwin, Adrienne Rich, Arundhati Roy, Joy Harjo, and Sandra Cisneros, to name a few.

The poems ( I can only give one example here of many) address subjects such as historical colonialism (“Love Letters in a Time of Settler Colonialism” by Tanaya Winder), slavery (“slaveships” by Lucille Clifton), current police violence, (“The Day John Coltrane Died, July 17, 1967” by Frank Rossini, a poem about Eric Garner), homelessness, (“Lower Queen Anne” by Thomas Hubbard), immigration (“Journeys” by Anna Bálint), climate crises (“The Continent of Plastic” by Judith Roche).

Deborah Faye Lawrence Resist Hate Map 2015

Detail of the Northwest

Interspersed throughout the book are artworks, some by familiar artists, Alfredo Arreguín, Deborah Faye Lawrence, Tatiana Garmendia, Matika Wilbur, and an artist from Haida Gwaii, Michaela McGuire.

MIchaela McGuire 2012

As I read these poems and short essays, I had a feeling of connection, of community, of hope, in this time of such separation and difficulty. Knowing that this many creative people (53 artists and 117 writers) address the challenges we currently face is comforting and uplifting.

The anthology was completed before COVID and the huge BLM protests this summer. But we see the same conditions already in place. Eric Garner said “I can’t breathe” 11 times. Protests against racism have been going on for decades, with their roots in slavery, where this anthology begins. The planet has been deteriorating, but Rajiv Mohabir offers hope: “Why Whales Are Back in New York City”: “Our songs will pierce the dark / fathoms. Behold the miracle: / what was once lost / now leaps before you.

The final poem by Ellery Akers also suggests a way forward: “At Any Moment, There Could be a Swerve in a Different Direction”: “it sounds like the click of knitting needles  as hundreds of thousands of women knit pink hats; / it looks like a coyote, crossing the freeway to go home. “

You can buy the anthology on their website

This anthology will have a virtual reading Thursday, October 8, 2020 at 7:30 PM – 9 PM. You can access it from this link.