Let’s play catch up.
I can at least speak about the inspiration for my first three books briefly. Simply put, for The Ronin Poetz, I was sidetracked a little in college and got into poetry. Towards the end of my senior year, I decided to combine my storytelling skills with my newfound powers of poetry.
The Ronin Poetzwas first a single poem. It was a long poem, but just one. It was seven pages or so. It was a poem about this warrior who spoke of his exploits/adventures thru poetry. Characters like that fascinate me, warriors who are destroyers but creators through art. Like in Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi Trilogy. You got a guitar player turned vengeful killer.
When I finished the first poem, I wasn’t thinking that it would, or could, be a larger story. I did have an understanding that the character in the story had potential for continuing adventures. At the moment, the character was nameless. Just called The Ronin Poet. I rested on the idea for a month. I wanted the Ronin Poet’s life to be an allegory for my own (at first). Whatever I went through, I’d put into poetry and make it a legendary, mythological event. But as the nineties started to wind down—and with so much learning of Black contemporary and ancient studies, I began to expand the allegory to encompass the struggles of Black people as a whole. I created a plot, more characters, allies, villains, mentors, families, and lovers to surround this central character. I planned for The Ronin Poetz to be a short chapbook, 14 poems long ... 155 pages and 54 poems later, I ended the story.
The Ronin Poetz took two months to write and five years to officially publish, or get on the market. It had an amazing underground run for its first print. Over two thousand were pushed. At the time, 9/11 was happening. Stores were a little reluctant to put a ‘militant’ piece of work on the shelf, even if it was the first African-American, narrative epic poem. Nonetheless, I toured through Black book stores and community centers. And while people loved the performance of some of the scenes, it was the questions and answers session where I started to create a lecture series.
The first thing I had to explain was the term ‘ronin’. It’s from Japanese terminology. A ronin is a samurai without a master to serve; forced to be a mercenary. It’s actually very disgraceful and dishonorable to be a ronin. But I flipped the concept. We as Black people, after the brutality of physical slavery, and living in the shadow of a mental slavery, and white supremacy, we search to be a ronin: to serve no master and be masters of our own fate.
The rest is literary history. The Ronin Poetz would get a worldwide release in March 2005.
Did I say this would be brief?
