For Ms. Merilene Murphy

I had to find out the hard way how unique Ms. Merilene Murphy was. Back when I was a young poet roaming the streets of Los Angeles, I just showed my poetry to her and she treated me accordingly. I showed her my print edition of the kinté space somewhere around 1992–94 and she paid me for the first issue. There was a poetry reading in Santa Monica (for the Highways clique) and she just called me to come and read because she was looking for “good” poets. These deceptively simple actions are now considered profoundly generous and insightful compared to the “normal,” frequent and regular treatment (actually non-treatment) for Bryan Wilhite in these days of America’s ironic struggle against extremism.

So like a little brother who loses a big sister, in a family that too spread apart over life in the city, I feel loss for the passing of Ms. Merilene Murphy. Being a child of the Black Baptist Church—and a child of Africa—it was for me to take for granted that the women can “read people.” I had to find out the hard way that Merilene Murphy’s reading of me was quite unique—and her vision is nothing to take for granted. What Apple Inc. is doing with iTunes is (to me) prefaced by what Ms. Merilene Murphy was doing back in the 1990s with Telepoetics, “a 501(c)(3) Literary & Education Corporation Specializing in the Production, Promotion & Distribution of Poetry & Performance Arts Projects via Telephony & Internet Technologies.” She was in the conceptual ballpark. Some differences are that her iPod was an entire building and she used streaming live instead of on demand storage.

My moves here at kintespace.com inherit from the work of Merilene Murphy. It seems so sad to point out what should be so obvious: every major generative event in my life was led by a Black woman—we can start with my mother. And it is even sadder to know that it is important to write this: my mother is not my servant—she is my mother. Even my IT career came from the vision of a Black woman, Nattineque McClain… Merilene Murphy, my sister, led the kinté space from the desktop publishing media to Internet multimedia. She led by example. She was never as preachy to me as my person always be. Preachy-ness has its heavenly place…

Do see the obituary for Ms. Merilene Murphy by Los Angeles Times Staff Writer Jocelyn Y. Stewart, “Merilene Murphy, 51; poet, literary activist and publisher.” Here in the kinté space see: “Under Peace Rising” and “these hands.”

The YouTube.com tribute shown above is provided by Roland Poet X (also here at kintespace.com). You will notice a dominant theme among the eulogizers: Merilene is “real”—here in the rasx() context this means that she was a woman of courage striving for wholeness and all that is beyond status breeding and the imperial small talk of condescending captives making simplistic assumptions and cartoon drawings.

rasx()