Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of San Diego City Works Press. In the lead-up to this and the publication of Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (in 2025), The Jumping-Off Place will be featuring some of the highlights from City Works Press’s many publications.
The following text, “Clouds Over Mecca” by DJ Watson was published in Sunshine/Noir: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (2005), City Works Press’s inaugural anthology.
By DJ Watson
Mecca don' be a place where Nan go. Not like Ms. Gwendolyn’s Mecca on the south side of Chicago where the little boy fell down the elevator shaft in the projects and died. It’s a space where she say words wail like sunshine screaming through dusty mini-blinds. She say poetry makes open wounds fill a body up and scars seal over and deliver. Nan calls it balm and that rhymes with calm, like me sitting on the floor cross-legged catching sunshine on the tip of my tongue. Or when I squeeze my eyes real tight, I see orange and yellow-red light floating inside me.
Nan say when she was a little girl she used to do that too, layin' on her front lawn wondering ‘bout god—was he a man, a woman, or nothing or air—watching the sky for signs. Tracin’ clouds with her fingertip--shapes like big ol’ elephants and hairy buffalos and alligators and long neck giraffes. Stuff you don’t normally see ‘cept in cartoons. Sometimes Nan gets mad and says why come cartoons like Lion King don’t have no people only animals/what is they doing to little kids minds these days—and I am usually coloring by then and ask Nan if she wants to color too. She say yeah baby and I hand her the box and we outline people and animals and sometimes we make animals that look like people and vice versa. That’s how come she knows dios es un pintor fabuloso—that’s Nan’s word fabuloso.
Sometimes she say stuff in Spanish, ‘cause she lives in San Diego, close to the border, and says we gotta learn languages so we can communicate instead a acting like the ugly Americans we is. I like that word communicate, cause it sound like moon and luna and room and sometimes me and Nan lay in her bed at night watching the moonlight draw pictures on the wall. We pretend we can fly in and out of craters in the moon’s face and I trace her lips with my fingertips.
And sometime I dream I am high in the clouds and they are blue cotton candy and I take a big bite, ummm--no sugar, just everything good for you. I can eat as much as I want and never get full. Just me and Nan flying on the carpet in the living room, legs dangling off the side as we dip and dive--but never get dizzy, watching the world spin.
And sometime we stop, depending on if we tired or not or if we need water or if we just wanna be nosy, like curious George swinging from tree to tree at the crossroads, playin’ the dozens and signifying ‘til his back-bone slips and the lion catches him red-handed. Then he gotta use more than a roadmap--gotta use lies and tricks to get his self outta the middle of the cookie jar. Nan be telling stories like her daddy and his mamma before her. She say it run in the family and that’s how she learned mostly everything, cause daddy Slim always say what’s the moral? at the stories end.
We sail over Timbucktu and Djenne where scholars all over the world came to study at the great mosque, and then we fly north over Bhagdad. The sky is dark and hot and it smells really bad from all the firebombs. All kinds a horrible things happenin’. Like people goin’ hungry, no water or electricity and babies and little kids and grandmas and grandpas suffering. Nan clears her throat, says the Mujahedeen turned fire worshippers to stone, topplin’ they towers cause they wouldn’t change they trifling ways. I love firelight and the warm space between Nan’s legs, which is the bestest place for tellin’ stories. She says Bhagdad’s where Ali Baba and the 40 thieves lived, stealing from the treasure house, and there go Al’ed Deen, a lazy boy who got fooled by a traveling Moor who was really a wizir. That’s a magician. And Disney done changed his name to Alladin. Nan say that’s the first thang colonizers do--change your birth name right before they steal your land. My name’s Imani and that means faith, cause when I was born the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck five times and I almost choked to death. But like Nan say that’s another story.
I say Nan, what’s a colonizer? and she says somebody like Christopher Colombus, who didn’t discover ‘merica or anything else. She say he got lost lookin’ for spice, which was kinda like drugs back in the day. Thought he was in India, but was really in Haiti, which he named Hispaniola after Spain cause that’s who he was working for trying to get the bling-bling. I laugh—say Nan…you ain’t ‘spozed to talk like that. She sucks her tongue. Say the Taino, Caribe and Arawaks were all ready living there so how he gonna discover anythang? And they really didn’t ‘preciate nobody claiming them, ‘specially Queen Isabella and her boyfriend Ferdinand. And that’s what colonization is—getting somebody to do your dirty work so you can stay clean like Baby Doc and the Tonton Makout and ‘merica outta be shame paying for the latest coup ousting President Aristide just cause they want to keep their strategic pearl and now they mad at Jamaica for taking him in.
She starts coloring real hard and fast talkin’ bout Lumumba, and Malcolm and the CIA and the ghost of King Leopold roaming the Congo forest where the Mbuti people stay. And she breaks the sunset orange and I give her rosy dawn and say--tell me about Toussaint Nan—cause that calms her nerves. She say they might have been lovers in a past life or at least good friends—it happens—especially in Haiti where they worked black people to death on the sugarcane plantations ‘cause we was cheap back then and didn’t cost as much like we do now in Somalia with the Arab trade.
Slave catchers puttin’ torture masks over maroon mouths so they couldn’t speak or tell stories to little kids, until the people couldn’t take it anymore and Boukman led the first rebellion. Then General Toussaint organized the people and made them drums talk and they fought ‘gainst Napoleon for thirteen years--blood flowed in the streets of the Caribbean. And when the planters figured out that drums really did talk, they took them away so they couldn’t parley, which means to chill and people had to meet on the down low to communicate. Yeah… I like that word.
Nan say the freedom drum was the people’s heartbeat and from then on they called the island Haiti which means land of mountains in Taino-Arawak. I draw a drum and she says uhm-hmmmmm and starts drawing vévés on the paper, which I color in. Nan say ground signs are geometric thoughts drawn in dirt and cornmeal and she gon’ be real careful and try not to break any more colors. I pat her head and say it’s okay Nan.
She draws caravans crossing sand dunes from north Africa to India to China and Europe—Nan be having spice-road-trip-dreams like Ibn Batuta. Or like Sheherazade telling the king stories all nightlong so he won’t cut off her head. For 1001 nights she ran game so tight it put him to sleep. And in the morning he was full of wine and vexed. So he spared her life ‘til the following night, still wanting more ‘cause one story led to the next. Nobody knows where the stories come from—but Nan say they real old. People used to sit in coffee shop and smoke the shusha and story tell, listenin’ to bubbles from the water pipe stem, sit back, relax, sewing rubies and gems. Like Tiamat, the goddess of chaos who was wise to the end, ‘til Gilgamesh got jealous and did her in. They were some of the greatest stories ever told and it’s a shame how the libraries are being destroyed and the oldest translations of the Ku’ ran lost. This time she breaks the Obsidian—and I just keep colorin’ clouds over Mecca in.
DJ Watson is an artist and a writer.