Dream in a Hailstorm of Riots

A poet for whom the blues, Surrealism, and anti-colonialism were all of a piece, Jayne Cortez was, as Amiri Baraka said, “in the grand tradition of revolutionary poets around the world.” At times it has been hard to access editions of her 12 collections, most of which were self-published, and so the appearance of Firespitter (Nightboat, 2025), a 600-page-plus collected poems, is immensely valuable and long overdue.

From the mid 1960s through the early aughts, Cortez wrote about the political crises of her times: Attica, Allende, Palestine, Rwanda. But like fellow African-American Surrealists Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman, she was as interested in transforming reality as in documenting it. She bursts generalities and stereotypes in startling catalogues of surreal images that build around repeated phrases like the riffs of an improvising soloist. In her work, observations of everyday life and political events turn into dream visions, apocalyptic landscapes, meditations, and exhortations that crackle with energy, rage, and love. Above all, she is perhaps the poet of what her generation referred to as “The Music,” the various traditions of jazz, the blues, and R&B that soundtracked the freedom dreams of the Black liberation struggle. Cortez wrote poems in tribute to musicians and led her own band, the Firespitters, for decades. Hers is a voice—both on and off the page—that speaks with authority, curiosity, and an unshakeable faith in the power of poetry to change consciousness and change lives.

She was born Sallie Jayne Richardson in 1934 to a soldier father and a secretary mother (she later took the name of her Filipina maternal grandmother). She grew up on an army base in Arizona, but her family moved to Watts, in southern Los Angeles, when she was seven. Following the riots of 1965, which were responses to decades of economic inequality and police brutality, Watts became shorthand for American’s urban “ghetto.” But, as Cortez later stressed, Watts was in reality a neighborhood teeming with life and art, a thriving Black artistic enclave that indelibly shaped her.

Cortez studied visual art and music in high school, with poetry merely “a pastime.” As a teenage “jazz fanatic,” she faked her age to get into the jazz clubs on South Central, then awash in the sounds of bebop, where she met trumpeter Don Cherry and saxophonist Ornette Coleman, the latter soon to become her first husband. Together, Cherry and Coleman would revolutionize jazz, although they might not have met had Cortez not served as a conduit. In 1956, Cortez and Coleman had a son, Denardo, who would later collaborate musically with both of his parents. Coleman struggled to make ends meet with his forward-looking music, while Cortez pursued a series of garment factory and secretarial jobs. Her experiences working with other women provided a solidarity that informed poems such as “I’m a Worker”:

Yes in the mornings on the buses 
and in the evenings coming home 
you’ll hear me talk about the foreman the 
floorlady the bossman & the bossman’s ho 
cause they all gettin rich off me and my veins 
varicose 
and believe me that’s all i’ve got to show

In 1959, Coleman made jazz history when he moved to New York and took up residency at the Five Spot Café. Cortez remained in Los Angeles, and the couple separated, officially divorcing in 1964.

Neither politics nor poetry were Cortez’s priorities at the time, but she was writing, and she experienced what she called “politics in life: integration, black and white relations, and police confrontations.” She became involved with the Civil Rights Movement, and in 1963, she went to Mississippi to organize a voting drive with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), where she worked with the legendary activist Fannie Lou Hamer.

On her return to LA, she threw herself into what some have termed the “Watts Renaissance.” As scholars Stephen Isoardi and Daniel Widener have shown, when the rich educational and club scenes in Black communities dwindled, Black artists stepped in with an education- and community-focused idea that saw no distinction between this public mission and a pursuit of the avant-garde and the experimental—a kind of aesthetic united front, out of which emerged the Watts Writers Workshop; the visual art of Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, and David Hammons; and the films of the “LA Rebellion.”

In 1964, Cortez attended a meeting called by Jim Woods, doorman of the Hollywood jazz club Shelly’s Manne-Hole, to discuss the formation of a new community arts organization. Cortez asked: Why not base the organization in Watts? Woods duly put up the money, and Studio Watts was born at a vacant furniture store. Cortez led improvisatory theatre workshops and produced original plays, poetry, and performance pieces, including a version of Jean Genet’s The Blacks. Following a dispute with Woods, the workshop split off as the Watts Repertory Theatre Company, with Cortez as artistic director.

Cortez also began to collaborate with pianist Horace Tapscott, founder of the Underground Musicians and Artists Association, subsequently the Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension (UGMAA), and the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (PAPA), whose populist avant-garde ethos was rooted firmly in community education and performance. Tapscott would later arrange the two albums recorded by Elaine Brown, future chairwoman of the Black Panther Party, whom he’d mentored as an aspiring singer. Cortez recalled that “[Tapscott and I] had a lot of conversations about music, about the daily rhythms of life, about family, friends, but we also talked a lot about liberation movements in Africa and around the world.”

In the summer of 1967, Cortez set off on a tour of Europe, South and East Asia, and West Africa—she was, she noted, “the first in our family to return to Africa in four hundred years”—before moving to New York. Artist Melvin Edwards had also made the cross-country move, and in 1969, Cortez asked him to make drawings for her first book, Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares, dedicated to the Watts Repertory Company. The two also began a romantic relationship that lasted for the rest of Cortez’s life. Pissstained Stairs takes its name from a poem for Leadbelly first published in the magazine Black World: “up north / where the El broke off / and the urban nigguhs blues / was stomped / right through the piss stain stairs / of the monkey man’s wares.” These often-bleak poems take place in a landscape of alcoholism, addiction, and the anguish of absent lovers. In the classic Coltrane tribute “How Long has Trane Been Gone,” the tendency of Black audiences to “Forget about the good things / like Blues & Jazz being black” is joined with the general condition of Black life in the US:

no city no state no home no Nothing 
how long 
How long 
Have black people been gone

But Cortez also presents Black music as a work of defiance. In “Ornette,” she describes Ornette Coleman’s playing as “Fierce Freedom Screams // heard in the beating heart / of R & B // Revolution & Blood . . . / a million strokes / of Naked Unashamed / Blackness / Walking Proud.” In “Dinah’s Back in Town,” dedicated to Dinah Washington, Cortez proudly rejects ideas of the female jazz singer as a victim or sex symbol:

I wanna be bitchy 
I said I wanna be a bitch 
cause when you nice 
true love don’t come 
into your life 
You get mistreated 
Mistreated & abused 
by a no good man 
who don’t care nothing 
’bout no blues

The book culminates in “Forreal,” a journey of reawakening—sexual, gendered, racial, political, poetic—echoing Malcolm X’s 1964 journey to Mecca, alluding to the Black Panthers, and to Cortez’s own recent voyage to Africa:

        Death 
You are ugly 
You are white 
Death you are Death 
no more Uh Uhnnn 
Don’t touch me 
I’m on my way to Mecca 
Elijah in my head 
a panther in my eye 
        Love Lives 
& I wanna taste myself inside

In 1971, Cortez founded Bola Press—“a press to stop oppression,” she joked—named after the Yoruba word for success. She published the majority of her own books and records with Bola until her death, echoing the self-determination practices of musicians Charles Mingus and Max Roach with Debut Records and Betty Carter with Bet-Car, of collectives like UGMAA and the AACM, and poets Amiri Baraka with Jihad and Haki R. Madhubuti with Third World Press. “I publish my own works,” she observed in 1976. “I’m in complete control. The only limits are the language or the limits I impose on myself.”

Cortez described her third book, Scarifications (1973), as being “concerned with New York City images—connecting them and juxtaposing them against human interior and exterior body parts.” She noted that “New York was and is a big international city. The streets are popping with different dialects. The city is backward and advanced at the same time.” “[C]itizens / break wind with me”, proclaims the gleefully personified city in “I Am New York City.” In “For a Gypsy Cab Man,” the city becomes a space of mobility and cross-cultural connection, of “temporary migration or permanent immigration . . . populations moving from one place to another out of necessity”, as the poet praises a taxi driver “who generally services the Black and Hispanic communities.”

And you say you came from Africa 
and you’ve been here working evenings 
going to school days 
                               for ten hard years . . . 
 

friend and collector of green cards 
                                                    thanks.

The word gypsy, now considered offensive, was then commonly used as a countercultural metaphor for freedom and movement (as, for example, in Jimi Hendrix’s 1970 album Band of Gypsys), and is not intended as a slur. 

Cortez’s New York is a space of cross-cultural connections, of the forces of movement and exchange as opposed to borders and hostility, understood both in the context of the classic blues themes of South-North migration and in the broader context of the African diaspora past and present.

But Cortez is keenly aware of the forces that wish to clamp down on such spaces of exchange. From the start, her poetry responded to the targeted assassinations of political leaders and the everyday violence policing black life. In his work of political philosophy Blood in My Eye (1972), George Jackson, cofounder of the Black Guerilla Family, argued that: “even funerals can be used as an issue, since there will be so many of them . . . [They] should be gala affairs, of home-brewed wine and revolutionary music to do the dance of death by.” The title poem of Cortez’s Festivals and Funerals (1971) condenses Jackson’s argument to those two repeated words, and in Cortez’s subsequent memorial poems for, among others, Alberta Williams King, Amílcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, Michael Smith, Christopher Okigbo, Henry Dumas, Clifford Glover, Claude Reese Jr., Amadou Diallo, and her friend Ana Mendieta, she stages elaborate acts of transmutation, simultaneously festival and funeral, sorrow and celebration, mourning and militancy.

Mouth on Paper (1977) opens with a tribute for two slain poets: Christopher Okigbo, killed in 1967 in pursuit of Biafran independence, and Henry Dumas, murdered by police on the New York City subway in 1968, at age 33. The poem is a virtuoso tribute. Self-reflexively summoning the powers of invocation, it is itself an invocation of surpassing power:

I need kai kai ah 
a glass of akpeteshie ah 
from torn arm of Bessie Smith ah . . . 
to belly-roll forward praise 
for Christopher Okigbo ah . . . 
guerrillas in the rainy season ah 
to boogie forward ju ju praise for Henry Dumas ah

This conjure bag of ingredients is carefully chosen. Bessie Smith was, at the time, rumored to have died from injuries in a road accident after local whites-only hospitals refused to admit her. Meanwhile, as Cortez scholar Renee Kingan observes, kai kai and akpeteshie were alcoholic beverages produced in defiance of prohibition in colonized Ghana, where Kwame Nkrumah took a swig of the latter after he was elected president of the newly independent nation in 1957. Kai kai is also a Yoruba exclamation expressing wonder. The poem culminates in a dizzying final stanza listing everything that has been invoked: kai kai, durbars, torn arms, canefields, feathers, skulls, ashes, snakes, eyeballs, cockroaches, sharkteeth, buffalo, spirits, ankles, hurricanes, gas pipes, blood pacts.

In “The Red Pepper Poet,” a tribute to French poet and diplomat Léon-Gontran Damas, Cortez writes of “that position beyond all grief,” the moment of death turned into an explosive carnival. If we remember an artist, such poems proclaim, they are alive.

***

Cortez’s printed work tells only half the story. During her career, she made almost as many albums as she did books. The second side of Clifford Thornton’s Communications Network (1972) is a sometimes-murky live recording of the entirety of Cortez’s Festivals and Funerals, featuring Thornton’s group. Her next album, Celebration and Solitudes (1974), finds her in duet with the jazz bassist Richard Davis in a series of surreal cityscapes or landscapes or seascapes or -scapes that escape all geographical definition: external states mirroring internal ones, internal states mirroring external ones, Surrealist chance connections stumbling across the marvelous, “the eruption of contradiction within the real,” to quote Louis Aragon. In 1978, she recorded the LP Unsubmissive Blues, and, two years later, reassembled the musicians from that project into the core of a new band, the Firespitters, which she led for the next 27 years.

The music offers a parallel to Cortez’s poetry, in which recurring phrases, often at the beginning of lines, form the equivalent of West African rhythmic cells or the “riffs” and “shouts” of big band jazz and R&B. Such phrases provide jumping-off points for ever-more expansive surrealist flights of improvisational fancy. Take, for example, “For the Brave Young Students in Soweto,” in which Cortez declaims over Bill Cole’s blaring nadaswaram, a loud South Indian double reed instrument, Joe Daley’s whooshing tuba, and Denardo Coleman’s accelerating-decelerating drums. Or consider “I See Chano Pozo,” an exuberant tribute to the Afro-Cuban conguero Cortez saw perform with Dizzy Gillespie in 1948, complete with exhortatory chants from the band. Once heard, such performances are not easily forgotten.

Cortez saw her work as part of an international movement against oppression, and, as she travelled more widely, her range of references became ever more international. In 1970 and 1971, she and Melvin Edwards made further trips to West Africa, and in 1977, they attended the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in Lagos, Nigeria, where Cortez observed “the contemporary international black arts movement that / had developed since African Independence” along with “the potential conflicts / and the imperfections.” “For the Brave Young Students in Soweto” appeared in the collection Mouth on Paper the same year: it’s a poem that, as scholar Barbara Christian notes, “became a mainstay in the activities” of the student movement at Berkeley opposing the University of California’s investments in South Africa. Today, debates about boycotts and US support for apartheid have been revived in the context of Palestinian activism, and Cortez’s poem draws explicit parallels to Palestine:

When i look at this ugliness 
and think about the Native Americans pushed 
into the famine of tribal reserves 
think about the concentration camps full of sad Palestinians . . . 
the diamond factories still operating in Amsterdam in Belgium . . . 
Soweto i tell you Soweto 
when i see you standing up like this 
i think about all the forces in the world 
confronted by the terrifying rhythms of young students 
by their sacrifices 
and the revelation that it won’t be long now 
before everything 
in this world changes

The year after Ronald Reagan’s election, Cortez published what may be her finest single collection, Firespitter (1982), containing classics such as “If the Drum is a Woman,” “The Red Pepper Poet,” “Nigerian/American Relations,” “Rape,” “Blood Suckers,” “I See Chano Pozo,” “There It Is,” and “No Simple Explanations.” In these poems, she gets down to fundamentals, naming the situation for what it is without sacrificing an iota of her imaginative verve or her surrealist transformations of reality. Whether telling political hard truths or home truths, or extending a metaphor until it vibrates into explosive shards, these poems rise to the times without being subsumed by or subordinated to them.

“If the Drum is a Woman” riffs on the title of Duke Ellington’s and Billy Strayhorn’s 1956 musical allegory, literalizing the metaphor to tell a story about the unspoken ubiquity of gender violence: “if the drum is a woman / don’t abuse your drum don’t abuse your drum.” “Rape” was written for Inez García and Joan Little, both of whom killed their rapists in 1974 and became cause célèbres in feminist solidarity campaigns nationwide. The poem is uncompromising in naming sexual violence as a tool of warfare, whether or not it takes place in an active combat zone:

What was Inez supposed to do for 
the man who declared war on her body 
the man who carved a combat zone between her breasts . . . 
This being war time for Inez . . . 
She stood with a rifle in her hand 
doing what a defense department will do in times of war . . . 
She pumped lead into his three hundred pounds of shaking flesh . . . 
then celebrated day of the dead rapist punk 
and just what the fuck else was she supposed to do?

Other poems stage complex reclamations of female icons that also question their political incorporation into systems of oppression. “So Many Feathers,” a praise poem for Josephine Baker, vociferously celebrates the multi-faceted artist while interrogating her 1974 performance for apartheid audiences in South Africa:

Josephine terror-woman of terrible beauty of such feathers 
I want to understand why dance 
the dance of the honorary white 
for the death white boers in durban

Likewise, “Acceptance Speech” addresses the compromises artists are expected to make—those notes of false gratitude and establishment jockeying, ending with an ironic expression of thanks which resonates all the more at a time when acceptance speeches and award ceremonies have become charged affairs for those choosing to speak up (or not) about ongoing genocide:

Thanks for rectum of imperialist flames in shit 
Thanks for glow of agent orange pus in orbit . . . 
Thanks no thanks 
                   and don’t touch it

Firespitter was followed in 1984 by Coagulations: New and Selected Poems. Coagulations: the drying blood of massacres, blood clots, and blockage; the accelerated apocalypticism of the ’80s, of US support for rightwing forces in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Grenada, and Panama, of continued apartheid in South Africa, of famine in Ethiopia, the violence of the Pinochet regime in Chile, and the bombing of Beirut, “under the urination of astronauts / and the ejaculation of polluted sparrows / and the evacuation of acid brain matter” (“Everything is Wonderful”); the logic of accumulation, of nuclear weapons and plundered natural resources, an imperialist family tree in which “this stockpile marries that stockpile / to mix and release a double stockpile of / fissions” (“Stockpiling”). With the end of apartheid, Cortez found reasons for hope. In 1991, she recorded a music video for “Nelson Mandela is Coming,” and in 1992, she and Ama Ata Aidoo founded the Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA). But she was keenly aware that narratives of triumph over tyranny with the end of the Cold War rendered the situation more precarious than ever, whether in the neo-colonial use of African leaders such as Angola’s Jonas Savimbi or South Africa’s Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, or the apotheosis of Pax Americana that is globalization, and of the necessity to “explode / & globalize that explosion into / a redistribution of all there is to redistribute” (“Cultural Operations 1992”).

Part of this process involves holding onto revolutionary memory, refusing what Cortez calls the “de-radicalization” of Black art forms such as jazz. In “The Revolutionary Orchestra,” she invokes the freedom fighter Jacob Morenga, who fought against German colonial forces in Namibia in the late 19th century:

I stomped on Apartheid 
in the Grand Apartheid Ballroom 
with Jacob Morenga & 
Revolutionary Orchestra of Namibia playing Free Jazz 
We knew how to darken airs of superiority 
Sink the fascist system in its frenzy 
& celebrate victory

Cortez’s later work provides a patchwork of references to Black art and anti-colonial history, names that might today risk passing out of currency, from Ellington to Morenga, Big Mama Thornton to Amílcar Cabral. While continuing to mark the ongoing reality of US racism and global neo-colonialism—Haiti, Rwanda, the LA Riots, the murder of James Byrd in Texas and Ken Saro-Wiwa in the Niger Delta—the poems insist on celebrating a revolutionary tradition aimed at victory: neither blanket forgetting nor reified nostalgia, but a revolutionary ensemble of living and dead invoked in the interests of the present. As Cortez argues in a lecture from Firespitter’s penultimate section, “the nature of black cultural politics / is to move forward & continue the battle for human rights / continue the decolonization process & the process of abolition / that was initiated in the 1960s.”

The final poem in Firespitter concerns neither politics nor music but a pigeon who reveals to the poet that they’ve flown to the moon and back. Seen as an irritant by humans, forever “crap[ping] on umbrellas in the rain,” the pigeon keeps its knowledge to itself: “I’m going to sit on my favorite limb and let / the sun honk while I / coo coo coo coo coo.” Not as exalted as its literary cousins—Attar’s hoopoe, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s skylark, John Keats’s nightingale—Cortez’s pigeon nonetheless channels a poetic language, for who knows what the pigeon might really be saying? The poem, titled “I was Dreaming,” seems to suggest the possibility in every moment of splitting reality open: of drums, of dreams, of revolt.

***

After she passed away of heart failure in December 2012, Cortez’s ashes were, at her request, split between Benin City, Nigeria, and Dakar, Senegal, the burial rites being performed by Erediauwa, the Oba (traditional ruler) of Benin. In the years since, her reputation has remained modest relative to her achievement, despite important scholarly work by Barbara Christian, Tony Bolden, and Renee Michelle Kingan, among others. When the academy and the major press publishing apparatus stage a selective “rediscovery” of some writers—often after their death, and often in response to real political issues, such as the Black Lives Matter protests of 2014 or the George Floyd Rebellion of 2020—those writers who didn’t negotiate the institutional structures of visibility in their lifetimes are still excluded by those same networks today, especially if their work is politically outspoken or formally experimental. Cortez self-published most of her work, and, while she taught at colleges on short-term positions, especially during the 1970s, she rejected being tied to institutions, explaining to her friend Jodi Braxton that she’d never considered being a tenured university professor because “she hadn’t wanted to be ‘owned’ that way.”

Cortez’s poetry also arguably breaks the unspoken rules of increasingly standardized contemporary conceptions of how poetry writes the self in an age dominated by social media and tending toward the highly artificial curation of the individual. Cortez commented to the poet and critic D.H. Melhem:

I use dreams, the subconscious, and the real objects, and I open up the body and use organs, and I sink them into words, and I ritualize them and fuse them into events. I guess the poetry is like a festival. Everything can be transformed. The street becomes something else, the subway is something else, everything at a festival is disguised as something else. Everything changes . . .Voices become other voices.

Though Cortez’s work is rooted in her own working-class, gendered, and racialized experience, it does not simply present autobiographical reports of her life and emotions. Rather, her surrealism—or, as she termed it, “supersurrealism”—is a tool for transforming an individual experience of the world into a collective one.

“Fuck it,” she exclaims in “Nighttrains,” “I say dreams are riots / I say we dream in a hailstorm of riots.” For Surrealists, Roberto Tejada notes, “the abject is a pageantry not of things that degrade but of all that we treasure.” In Cortez’s work, we find the violence of racial terror: political assassination, lynching, starvation, sexual violence, acts of everyday cruelty. But this violence meets its counter-impulse in the language of eroticism, of opening and spilling orifices, the shuddering of the body and of the earth itself, its earthquakes and volcanos, which seem to rise up in revolt. “Free spirits,” she wrote in 1982, “know that no revolution has gone far enough.” And in the interests of that revolution, as she puts it in “The Red Pepper Poet,” “when fifty drums hemorrhage / in the middle of the rhythms / when the hurricane turns / [. . .] Won’t you dance.”