By Joyce Kryszak
Buffalo, NY – For more than 30 years, African American poet and performance artist Jayne Cortez has been fiercely blunt about everything from women's rights to apartheid. Friday and Saturday nights, Cortez will share her work and her views at two appearances with Just Buffalo Literary Center.
Cortez is not one to mince words. Her social outrage takes graphic form whether in poem or song. In her poem, There it is, Cortez speaks of the "decomposed look of repression." In another called "Rape," there are violent images too explicit to read on the radio. Cortez says she has no interest in producing weak work.
"Whatever I do is for the dynamism of the poetry," Cortez said. "I try to express things in a stronger manner. I use strong words -- whatever strengthens the work."
And her words are strong -- if not militant. In fact, Cortez has been called a revolutionary. And the "Womanist Warrior Poet." But this warrior denounces any weapon more deadly than the pen or tongue. That is why she believes the war on Iraq is wrong.
"I know and you know and everybody knows that peace is better than war, that the elimination of hunger is better than war, that the sound of the human voice in its calmness and its shrillness is better than war," Cortez said.
Cortez is this month's featured writer at Just Buffalo Literary Center. At 8pm Friday at Hallwalls, Cortez presents a screening of her film, "Yari Yari: Black Women Writers and the Future." Then Saturday night at 8, there will be a reading by the author in Just Buffalo's Hibiscus Room.