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Line of Sight

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There's nothing equivocal about Michele Gibbs. Her vision is clear, her analysis grounded and informed by a lifetime of struggle and study, her delivery one of quiet confidence, her goals well stated and without unnecessary compromise.

Chicago born and raised, of a Jewish Communist mother and an Afro-American father who served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish civil war, to prevent a Fascist government from coming to power, Gibbs has known oppression from her earliest years ("...times when the sight of my face / was enough / for bosses to show my mom the gate: / no nigger lovers here": from "to begin").

In later years, after time spent in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and other points in between, she found herself in Detroit, a place she keeps going back to both in person and in thought ("Someday / i'll write / my last Detroit poem ... And until then, / while there is witness to bear, / work to share, /and some people to care - / i'll be there.": from "Someday").

Gone to Grenada in the '80s, to work in the newly elected progressive government of Maurice Bishop ("The arithmetic of justice, / The equation of participation, / The multiplication of mobilization, / The calculus, in sweat, / of transformation... Say it any way you like, / This is a working revolution": from "It's simple, but not easy"), she was imprisoned by anti-Bishop forces when the U.S. army, sent by Ronald Reagan, invaded ("...the heavy handed youths / obeying orders / came at midnight / of the day / they killed you, Maurice, / to come for me": from "Fragmentation bombs: scenes from a war").

Forcibly deported by the U.S. invaders, Michele later lived on the Greek island of Lesbos, and in Oaxaca, Mexico, where we met some ten years ago. Sculptor, artist, essayist, poet and teacher, Michele Gibbs has never given up the struggle to make a better world. In a style that is spare, focused, and calm, she continues to be sometimes angry, sometimes sad, but never despairing or defeated.

"Line of Sight", her latest book, contains poetry and essays from previous works and some new material, as well as a large selection of her drawings and sculpture. It opens with the capture and removal of African peoples for the slave trade, and follows their (and her) struggle for freedom, equality, and justice.