SWWIM sustains and celebrates women poets by connecting creatives across generations and by curating a living archive of contemporary poetry, while solidifying Miami as a nexus for the literary arts.
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
Insane is something else. Insane is white sheets and long guns, breaking windows and lynching people, killing people because they are Black. The insane people that attack me and my family have no rhythm, no logic, no reason.
That is insane.
I am tired but I am not insane.
About the poem: Tired, but not insane" is taken from Ocean Stirrings: A tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings. The last part of the publication features poetry imaginatively creating the voice of Oseyan, a character invented to pay tribute to Louise Little. This is one of several poems created to find a voice for the character during parts of the 1940s and 1950s in Michigan, a period when she is confined to the spaces of a mental asylum.
Merle Collins is a writer of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels are Ocean Stirrings: A tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings (2023), The Colour of Forgetting (2023, 1995), and Angel (2011, 1997). Her short story collections include Rain Darling (1997) and The Ladies are Upstairs (2011). She has also written a biography, The Governor's Story: The Authorised Biography of Dame Hilda Bynoe. Her critical works include “Themes and Trends in Caribbean Writing Today” in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World; “To be Free is Very Sweet” in Slavery and Abolition; “Cultural Expression and the Grenada Revolution,” a chapter in Nicole Phillips-Dowe & John Angus Martin, ed., Perspectives on the Grenada Revolution, and “Explorations of the Self,” a chapter in Raphael Dalleo and Curdella Forbes, Caribbean Literature in Transition. Collins is also the producer of a documentary, Saracca and Nation, exploring African influences on the culture of Grenada and its sister isle, Carriacou. She is Professor Emerita, University of Maryland, College Park.
"Tired, but not insane" is taken from Ocean Stirrings: A tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings. Permission granted by the author.
