Live From Planet Earth

2017-05-01T07:58:00.001-04:00

Live From Planet Earth features stories and products of self-sustaining tropical organic beings as meditation and inspiration, both for others returning to the lifestyle (livity) of the land and also for the merely curious. Please link us with any such Afro/Indigenous that you know or meet whom we may visit. Give thanks, bless up.

Brian Hughes Kasoro // Director
//scripts at liberatormagazine.com
//youtube.com/livefromplanetearth

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Thoughts on constantly achieving this mind-body practice / "More than being proud to be seen in novelty"

2016-12-15T16:00:00.000-05:00

In "Literacy: Reading the Word & the World", Paulo Freire recalls an adult literacy workbook in Sao Tome with pictures in it. Next to a picture of a group of young people swimming it is written, "It is by swimming that one learns to swim." Next to a picture of youths working it is written, "It is by working that one learns to work." And at the bottom of the page it is written, "By practicing we learn to practice better." A profound truth on the importance of mind-body practice for the simple sake of practicing living better.

But there's just something about the way Bird put it -- this fusion of jazz and mdw ntr -- that is so sweet:

“Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”
-Charlie Parker

And perhaps this is what we feel when we get tired of taking pictures of moments. If, however, we choose for our processes of literacy to never end, to always tell our stories humbly, then all of our texts and works (written words, spoken words, photos, videos, songs, performances) aren't just pictures of individual moments, but also snapshots of a collective eternity full of texts and works (stories) that guide us. We sort of learn that our stories are something valuable when we learn that others have preserved their stories, but we only know why stories are preserved when we come to know why our stories are worth preserving. Connection is necessary to that process. And faith is the result of such connection. Likewise, we know good listening because we've witnessed it and can testify to its power. The more we practice good listening, in faith, the more we find ourselves guided by the bodies of stories out there, the less we find ourselves guided by just our individual moments. More than being proud to be seen in novelty, we're honored -- at peace -- when we practice better, with the possibility of being a literal part of the classic; a shining measure of time in a timeless eternity.

Originally Posted 8/4/2011

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Id, Ego, & Superego Walk Into a Bar

2016-12-10T14:37:00.000-05:00

Me and my homie talk about Freud a lot. Mostly because of his work defining the theoretical constructs of the brain -- Id, Ego, Super-Ego. Pretty much the foundation of Western Psychology, and boy do we got beef with many things "Western", so what better place to start breaking that shit down? That's my self-analysis, anyway. [By "breaking down", I'm moreso articulating resistance, I'll leave the actual breaking down of things to good timing and fate].

I think many of the conversations we might have with each other -- now I'm talking about the community in general -- about our visions for how to live and how we want to live (and how those who came before us lived sustainably -- in harmony), would be served well by our deciding whether or not we are going to accept Freud's definitions of the human psyche. Despite what I'm about to write, I've yet to decide this -- to be honest, probably because Freud is a "white" dude (by "white" I mean, please see the post titled "White Privilege").

Even Freud wasn't able to define this stuff without argument so instead of using Wikipedia I'll shoot for a simple definition my damn self.

Essentially the Id is the natural instinctive portion of our psyche. So theoretically, if our brains were composed of just the Id, we'd be more like animals -- guided by our instincts. Living in Modern Western Civilization sometimes makes me think, would that be such a bad thing?

The Ego is that part of our psyche that organizes our instincts with our reality, enabling us to make our own decisions as individuals (we can assume, based on our individual experiences).

The Super-Ego is that part of our psyche that analyzes and critiques our Ego's organization into rights and wrongs and makes judgments (we can assume, based on the organization of reality performed by the Ego) about which of our experiences are preferable, from a self-organized perspective of course.

Now, to me, there are some serious dangers to self-organized perception -- that is, if we believe that pre-self-organized perception (and by "pre-organized perception" I mean, higher power anyone?) is of value. If so, we'd have to make sure we constantly asked ourselves, "are we ignoring pre-self-organized perception?", in order to stay balanced.

Many folks assume that the Super-Ego is essential to long term thinking because they assume long term thinking (prediction) is kin to mathematical logic. Additionally, many folks assume logic is necessary, not just for long term survival, but for ideal long term survival and, more, for comfort.

These assumptions hold that the Id is kin to emotional sense -- instinct.

I never saw Freud as a cheerleader of Ego thought, although I do see Western Civilization as such. And I actually never saw Freud as the inventor of the "three part psychic construct". Frankly, I never was convinced he deserved that much credit.

We like to categorize things -- civilizations, cultures -- and each other, according to how much they represent a tendency towards one of the three parts. And this categorizing often comes with judgments. And judgments often come with reaction. And reaction inspired by judgment tends to be extreme. So if we judge any of the three parts as "unhealthy", then we react by embracing the extreme opposite. But, in my opinion, such reaction can become idol worship. And worshiping any of the three aspects of the [theoretical, lol] psyche as savior -- against the devil of its opposite -- is sinful. As always, balance is key.

[I didn't realize it when I wrote it, but the title of this post is ironic, because I'm sure you'd actually find them in a bar, located in people's psyches of course, but in a bar nevertheless]

Originally Posted 8/8/2011 2:33 AM

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Cuba, 2015

2016-12-09T14:50:00.000-05:00

lib.mg exclusive feature
Clyde Taylor {New York, New York}

Editorial Note: Fidel Castro invoked a seductive binary as an aesthetic approach to reading the world when speaking about the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987 and 1988 during the Angolan liberation movement; the world would know itself in terms of before and after it. Toussaint L’Overture says “Let them tremble when they reach our coast ...” Fidel says “You will never have Cuba”. The nuances of concession, negotiation, and intermingling often get lost in headstrong revolutionary-period narratives. The before-befores and after-afters are important. Sex, Lies, and Tourism, for instance. In Cairo, on behalf of Namibia, Cuba just wanted to be at the table, after all.

●●●
As Gertrude Stein is famously reported to have said on her death bed, “Alice, what is the answer?” No response: “Alice, what is the question?” Stein observed a sound path: in order to find the best answer, you need to find, or choose, the right question. Here I track maybe six answers searching for the right question to be put to new relations between the United States and Cuba.

Historian Gerald Horne offers an answer to a question few have bothered to ask. He argues that economic and political pressures from the African presence was a major reason why the colonial elite decided to wage a war for independence. (“Negro Insurrection and Foreign Invasion: Slavery, 1776 and the Founding of the United States”)

The political outlook in the early (U.S.) American colonies was fraught with chaos and insecurity, much of it gathered around the presence of the African. The slave trade, one of the most stupendous profit-making operations in history, was under attack from abolitionists in London. As commodities, humans are more complicated than rice, sugar or tobacco. The Crown deployed Africans as sailors and soldiers keeping the peace. The numbers of Africans grew to an alarming ratio. Real and rumored insurgencies had to be factored into every calculation, even more when African rebels combined with Spanish or French enemies to attack settlements. To deal with these and other pressures, the colonists went to war.

I once wrote that war has been good for black Americans. No matter which side Africans supported in the Revolutionary War, for instance, some were sure to benefit. That was a miscalculation. What I saw as the potential for African Americans to capitalize on the discombobulation of wartime, the American “fathers” saw as signs of an unreliable alien in the Blacks. Horne quotes Benjamin Franklin: “Every slave might be reckoned a domestic enemy,” and finds John Adams and James Madison in agreement. These founders of the republic sniffed the disagreeable prospect of Pan-Africanism and Du Bois’ ideal of a world-wide coalition of people of color, what he called “the darker races,” before the age of imperialism made such links clear.

The gains U.S. Blacks have salvaged from U.S. wars have to be measured among mixed considerations. How do such gains related to gains made from resistance to injustices? And are these gains only relative to the wider framework of the global struggle against racial colonialism? Most U.S. war-like actions have been aggressions designed to suppress people of color, as Du Bois and others knew. American imperialists in Du Bois’ time saw an affinity between “the little brown brothers” abroad and their counterparts at home. The minor benefits that fell to African Americans were side effects that never threatened the status or privileges of white freedom. The perception of U.S. Blacks as semi-aliens and potential threats lies sleeping in the White American imaginary, raising its unhinged head to expose President Barack Obama as a Mau Mau from Kenya.

What has this to do with Cuba?

The wart on the face that America shows the world was rapped by Samuel Johnson well before the 1776 revolt. “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” The Confederacy followed the example of the original founders by going to war for their independent, God-given right to decimate another people. To paraphrase the definition of Freedom in Ambrose Bierce’s satirical Devil’s Dictionary, “A political condition that some nations seek to enjoy in virtual monopoly.”

Frederick Douglass hammered still-ringing questions in his 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” It is one of the great American documents, an unarguable delegitimization of the intent behind the Declaration of Independence. “[Y]our shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock ... a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” Here he upends the face-off between civilization and savagery, a chosen trope of the racial colonizer. The bite of Douglass’ words is the fiercest anti-racist language we hear until Malcolm X speaks a century later; the cover up has had a lot of success. Douglass knew what few see clearly today. Some independence declarations are made to end oppression. Others are made to extend it. The search for freedom in the birth of the nation was at its core a search for the freedom to oppress.

How long. How long after New world nations got their independence did it take them to end slavery? Mark that time and you find a trail to conquest-driven freedom. Haiti holds one end of the spectrum, ending slavery in 1804 in synch with its victory over the French colonizers. It went on to promote emancipation at large. “In 1816,” writes Eduardo Galeano, “it was Haiti that furnished Bolivar with boats, arms, and soldiers when he showed up on the island defeated and asking for shelter and help.” In exchange for military troops and aid, Bolivar promised President Alexandre Petion that if he was successful in his mission to decolonize Latin America, he would free the slaves. That promise was largely kept. Venezuela, Colombia (including Panama), Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia all began ending slavery around 1815, soon after winning independence from Spain, though the process wasn’t completed in some of these countries until 1854. At the other end of the spectrum, as Horne notes, slavery in (U.S.) America escalated after the Revolutionary War and became more brutal. The American democracy continued to produce “the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes” for eighty-nine years, the crowning record, and racial segregation for another century.

What has this to do with Cuba?

Remember the Alamo? Honestly, no. The Euro-Americans who died at the Alamo were martyrs to the right to bring slavery into Mexico which had abolished it in 1829, as well as to grab land from the Comanche in Mexican territory that extended as far north as Colorado. To bring success to their mission the settlers played the Independence card, declaring themselves the Republic of Texas. Once the dust settled, the new nation seceded from Mexico, gained huge land spaces, and then got itself annexed to the United States with the right to slave labor guaranteed. When Rick Perry and other Texans bluster about seceding from the U.S., they are not channeling the Confederacy as much as waxing nostalgic for the time when Texans used the independence gambit and got away like bandits.

(A few die-hards pretend that the Republic of Texas was never fully annexed, and today run a kind of Mom and Pop shadow government. A candidate for governor recently ran as a secessionist and got 19,000 votes.)

Declaring independence has been a key maneuver among the “Little Europes”-- overseas colonies whose European settlers came in numbers and settled to stay, like Canada, Australia, Kenya, Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa. Some of these immigrants adopted strategies from the Yankee playbook, going to war if necessary. The freedom they sought, the freedom to oppress, has been described by George M. Fredrickson as “white freedom” in his book "White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African history." “Sometimes…the cause of white freedom and independence was directly linked with a desire to maintain flagrant forms of racial hegemony.” Gerald Horne notes that when Ian Smith declared the independence of Rhodesia from Great Britain in order to block decolonization of what is now Zimbabwe, he “argued that his unilateral Declaration of Independence was a replay of 1776.”

Ancient history. What about Cuba today?

Cuba shares a painful historical experience with the Philippines. Sectors of the Filipino population fought a war of liberation from Spanish colonialism that was gaining momentum until the United States came in and car-jacked their insurrection, defeated Spain and battled the Filipino revolutionaries in a very bloody war (during which Americans refined water-boarding). The Philippines were shifted from one Euro-American colonizer to another. To save face, the Spanish colluded with the Americans to stage a phony naval battle before surrendering. This is a meme of Western colonialism, passing dominions around like call girls at a Dominique Strauss Khan party instead of letting them fall into the hands of the locals. Some say this Philippine intervention is ancient history; but it is easy to match similar tactics in the U.S. attack on Vietnam’s revolution for self-determination.

The staged event, the manufactured threat, the call to an endangered honor, the seething media blitz are all part of the tool kit of U.S. expansionist geopolitics. “You couldn’t make this stuff up,” says the CIA chief in a Jason Bourne movie. But the real CIA and the Pentagon with their media hacks have no writer’s block when it comes to fabricating a pro war scenario. Richard Sanders has framed a compilation: “How to Start a War: The American Use of War Pretext Incidents.” Pretexts for military offensives are no more occult than espionage, black ops, war game and white-washing historical narratives. Much of the discourse of U.S. state-craft is in fact pretexts. The Declaration of Independence for example works also as a Declaration of Innocence pre-texting present cut outs and future double-dealing.

How does this relate to Cuba?

Remember the Maine? I was taught to remember it as an atrocity to be avenged by Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill. The Maine was a battleship that in fact blew itself up in Havana harbor by letting fire get into its weapons storage. The domestic war party cranked up its mob patriotism and stole another revolution in Cuba at the same time as in the Philippines.

We mis-remember the accidental tragedy of the Maine. What we don’t remember is the Cuban revolution for independence from 1868 to 1898, because, as Ada Ferrer points out, (U.S.) Americans have a way of ignoring the realities of the people they engage with. Ferrer reminds us of this key struggle in the island’s history in her book, "Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898". And what a revolution it was! It was a striking stand-alone insurgency beside the raids for white freedom launched from 1776 on. The planters bent to necessity and joined with slaves, who consequently became ex-slaves in an army that was deeply integrated, with troops of all races commanded by officers that included Black and Mulatto generals. The most illustrious of them was Antonio Maceo. Maceo and his successes against the Spanish colonizers were victories fought for the ideal of making Cuba a multiracial, antiracist society. There were, he declared, “no whites nor blacks, but only Cubans.”

As in the Philippines, the U.S. snatched the prize. “United States intervention,” Ferrer writes, “at its most basic level, blocked an independence sought by violent and peaceful means for three decades.

The multiracial and antiracist principles of the Cuban revolutionaries were running against the tide of supremacist ideology of social Darwinism and the pseudo-scientific racism of Arthur de Gobineau. “[I]t is clearly significant,” writes Ferrer, “that in an age of ascendant racism, the United States opted to temper the victory of a multiracial movement explicitly antiracist.”

Once the U.S. took over the administration of Cuba from the Spanish, they disarmed the nationalist revolutionaries and gave favorable positions to Spanish bureaucrats. They engineered a reversal of the revolutionary ethos, demanding that Cubans prove their readiness for independence by miming “civilization and modernity” as defined by the occupiers. General William Shafter: “Self-government! Why these people are no more fit for self-government than gunpowder is for hell.” One test of civilized behavior set up by this occupying army, which included many Texan troops, was to re-subjugate Blacks. The Cuban elites gave in with only a little resistance.

At some points questions become answers and vice versa.

Where has the U.S. intervened in support of a movement for freedom, independence or self-determination of people of color? Instead its habit has been to watch for the rise of liberation movements among first world peoples and like a shark smelling blood move in for the kill. Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano analyses this aspect of white freedom as “the coloniality of power.” He writes: “One of the fundamental axes of this model of power is the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism.”

When the Fidelistas rolled into Havana victorious over the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, they carried memories of the earlier Cuban revolution that the U.S. had tried to erase. The 1959 revolution “embraced the independence movement as its spiritual and ideological predecessor,” writes Ada Ferrer. “It extolled the anti-imperial and antiracist nationalism of nineteenth century figures, and it excoriated the intervention of the United States. By its own account the revolution of 1959 represented the fulfillment and embodiment of nineteenth century patriotic ideals, thwarted by the intervention of the United States in 1898 and by the decades of direct and indirect American rule that followed.”

If J.F. Kennedy had understood more of this history, he might not have greenlighted the Bay of Pigs invasion. The Castro revolutionaries predicted a U.S. counter-revolutionary assault, and counted on it. The CIA planning for this counter-revolutionary coup began on schedule under Eisenhower a few months after the Cuban liberation. The pretext this time was that the invasion was supposed to look like it was executed by Cuban exiles in the United States. In the mix was the fantasy of the Cuban people rising up to greet the invaders as liberators, throwing roses in their path and joining the counter-revolution. The threat of communism was also part of the ticket, even though as we have seen, the pattern was set long before communism became a global factor. Not long after the “perfect” military fiasco at the Bay of Pigs (which included plans to simultaneously assassinate the Castro brothers and Che Guevara), the revolution declared itself Marxist-Leninist. The Bay of Pigs was an attempt to baby-snatch the new Cuban revolution like the one in 1898.

The rationale that a communist Cuba must be eliminated is only the latest iteration of the (U.S.) American fear of and hostility toward alternative political possibilities. Long before Marx, the Haitian Revolution was opposed by the United States out of fear that it would spread a contagion (a “domino effect”) for liberation from slavery and White colonialism. Fearing a liberated Haiti, Thomas Jefferson “warned that Haiti had created a bad example and argued it was necessary to ‘confine the plague to the island.’" The U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba has tried to revive the “White Curse,” as Eduardo Galeano calls it, placed on a free Haiti. From some angles, Cuba looks like the twentieth and twenty-first century version of Haiti -- a thorn in the side of American dominance. The dissonance between the American and Cuban way of addressing freedom springs from roots in the colonial past, a struggle for or against the persistent coloniality of power. Apartheid in South Africa offered a challenge to the two ways of making free. The U.S. supported the Apartheid government until forced to change its policy by international and national pressure through divestment and economic sanctions, including African American protests led by Randal Robinson and TransAfrica.

That’s the American side of the story; a credible run against type; one more time when unloved protesters saved the country from its worst impulses -- for a minute. But the remarkable Cuban contribution to the overthrow of Apartheid pales in the U.S. memory like the revolution of 1868. Cuba supported liberation movements in Africa from 1960, in the Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia, and most importantly in Angola, where it sent over 55,000 troops to confront and defeat the South African Defense Forces. It was this exceptional act of popular liberation that drew the Apartheid regime to the negotiations that ended its White supremacist order. It was the flip side of the Bay of Pigs invasion, a brilliant military campaign to liberate instead of a pitiful flop of an invasion to repress. Nelson Mandela saluted this act: “What other country has such a history of selfless behavior as Cuba has shown for the people of Africa? ... In Africa we are used to being victims of countries that want to take from us our territory or overthrow our sovereignty. In African history there is not another instance where another people has stood up for one of ours ... The decisive defeat of the aggressive apartheid forces destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor.” This story is told in Cuba, An African Odyssey, a masterful documentary made by Egyptian filmmaker Jihan El Tahri, available on YouTube.

Two societies in the Western hemisphere, wide apart in their ideas and practice of freedom and humanistic values. The gulf gapes when Little Havana propagandists denounce Cuba on human rights while ignoring the innocent and tortured political prisoners on Guantanamo, Cuban land that the U.S. seized after the 1898 invasion.

So, we come to the question we’ve been searching for.

Will the opening of new contacts between the U.S. and Cuba produce benefits for Cuban people not only in material health, but spiritually and culturally as well, since the concept of how to be human splinters, with one society modeling itself as universal and transcendental norm? Can U.S. foreign policy, unfolding in screeds of freedom and free trade, put aside its appetite for vulnerable anticolonial movements? (Do we remember Grenada?) Will that policy try to make of the Castro revolution a forgotten history the way it did the rebel republic of 1868?

The right wing castigates Obama for this deal of opening to Cuba because “we haven’t gotten anything” for it. This sounds like a design to update the terms for ending the U.S. occupation after 1898 “civilization and modernity.” What will the price be to earn membership in “the international community?” Laid out in Americanist rhetoric, it will necessarily be a demand for Cuba to make itself a place more to the liking of U.S. interests -- a nation closer to the Batista Cuba that the Fidelistas overthrew -- that’s what counter-revolutions do.

Or, will the Cuban people hold onto their well-graced identity, with its rhythms, flavors and colors, its soulful humanism, confident in the joy of their freedom to grow, free from any freedom other than their own? -END-

Dr. Clyde Taylor is author of The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract Film and Literature)

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On Afrocentricity, Diop, Egypt, & Scholarship

2016-10-08T12:00:00.012-04:00

A close friend of mine shared with me some of his thoughts on the recent post "The Fallacies Of Afrocentrism" and the response post from Kintespace, "Flippant Remarks about 'The fallacies of Afrocentrism'". His insight is both profound and invaluable. Hopefully we can encourage him to expand these thoughts into an article for the magazine. For me this conversation is important because identity is vital. I know and love too many folks who struggle with finding theirs and often get muddled in pseudo-science in trying to find themselves. We have a responsibility to make things clear. His thoughts gave me a greater understanding of my own identity in the context of ancient African civilization and reminded me that scholarship is a process to be engaged and built upon, not a dogma:

On Diop, his imperfections and continuing his work:
My opinion (w/ some disclaimers) is this:
1) I've not honestly read Asante or Karenga yet and,
2) Diop was Diop. He did his own research and worked and challenged scholars in the field during that day. Fact of the matter is though is that M. Diop made his transition in 1986. His students are Theophile Obenga (Congo), Aboubacry Moussa Lam and Babacar Sall (both Senegal). Obenga was with him in Cairo in 1974 (UNESCO "Peopling..."), and Lam wrote his dissertation on the migrations of the Peul from Kmt [Kemet/Egypt]. Also, Cameroon has an Egyptology program at the University out there at Yaoude.

His work was profound, largely true (though he made some mistakes) and seminal; but not expert. Diop had the equivalent of 2 PhD's (one in physics and one is history). He was an eclectic scholar. But, to my knowledge, he didn't start learning glyphs until the 1970s and there is never one instance in which he cites a text which he himself translated.

Diop's work (and he hinted at this by telling Obenga that he'd never write again the topic of Egypt as an African civilization if he felt he'd "won" in Cairo) was meant as a springboard. That's exactly what folk on the continent are starting to do now. It's exactly what we need. It's easy to take shots at Diop's work 50/60 years later when 1) That's not even the whole of his first work folk are reading in English and 2) It's his first work.

On Afrocentricity as "fallacy", ancient Egypt, humanity + scholarship:
Molefi Asante and others are irrelevant. If you're not doing research with primary sources, no right to speak. Of course, Africa is characterized by much, much more than Kmt, but Kmt was a part of it: and whether black folk came from there or not -- and there's not reason why African's on the continent would, as Ann Macy Roth states look to Kmt, because it's respected by the West, when they have little to no contact with the West (i.e. It shouldn't be in their oral histories, see Peul, Songhay, Baasaa, Wolof) -- we're still who we are (that is, human).

The point of reclaiming history is to know who we are and frame our existence (Furr's point about not taking pride in our ancestors was obviously asinine). If we don't expand the discourse about African history in a meaningful way; that is learning Arabic, saving those documents and researching Kmt, oral histories, meanings behind symbols, anthropological work on pre-colonial religious practices, etc, then we've missed the boat. The truth is always better than any fantasy we could ever kick up: we owe it to our children, ourselves and our ancestors to get it right.

Romanticizing about anything is backwards. Too many of us get caught up in focusing on white folk to the point that we lose ourselves and feel that we have to evoke civilization in order to feel human. White folk ain't that important; our children are. Asante needs to feel himself relevant, so he writes his own holiday into the historical narrative. Where's the scholarship in that?

Fact is though, if we don't do the work, then cats like him get to speak 1) because he is speaking, 2) because white folk like seeing it and, 3) because it's easy for white folk to beat down. Hence we get the short end of the stick by not hittin' these cats up -- intellectually. Just prove his points wrong and move on. Or don't bother and move on anyway. Asante will always find an audience though, even among black folks because there are people who need to feel -- there's a void there. Our responsibility is to take care of that -- it's what we've been trained to do.

We have to move beyond the discourse on Afrocentrism in our work. We can point it out as fallacious, but the work has to be geared to another frontier. Otherwise folks are speaking for "us" who are really in the end only speaking for themselves. It also gives white folk the tools to beat down our self concept in front of those among us who don't have the acumen to know better, which is the true shame in all of this.

On rural living and the need for direct identity:
As Diop continually reiterates, the point of historical research is the reconstruction of historical consciousness. Example: my most profound experiences in Senegal were in the village. If anyone wants to know how African we are, just talk so someone rural. It's seriously eery to hear something and literally feel like you're amongst family members. I can't explain it. My friend just got back from Guinea and was mentioning to me how folks there did the same song and dance (i.e. catch the spirit, fall out and be covered with cloths) rituals there as black folks here do in church. I think the ultimate point of understanding where you come from is to be, historically, but really through that, spiritually grounded. Not knowing where we're from creates a serious void. Folk can chose their own paths as they please, but it's the feeling connected to something that's key. Right now we're connected to a thing we don't want to be associated with, and that's a dangerous/suicidal combination.

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Ayi Kwei Armah, Lauryn Hill and "The Dance of Inspiration"

2016-10-08T12:00:00.011-04:00

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

When I think about the ways that some have excoriated Lauryn Hill for her apparent crimes against humanity (real or imagined), I have surmised that "the debate," to quote someone I'm reluctant to quote, "has been miscast from the start." What is seemingly at play is a difference in both the modes and understanding of inspiration, made apparent by the pleas (sometimes dressed as gestures of "concern") for Lauryn Hill to find, or conjure, her inspiration from somewhere.

Anywhere.

It occurred to me that you can discern plenty about someone's modes of inspiration (and predict future resonance with your own) by the expectations they levy on others to spontaneously “create” and “be inspired” (timelines and codes of conduct included). Simply put: Knowing one's/someone's “inspirational lineage” can increase the clarity quotient. And, so, when I ponder adding –- “how do you cultivate inspiration?” (not to be confused with “what inspires you?”) –- to my conversation queues in the present and future – I'm so sincere.

Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah waxes eloquent about inspiration throughout his novel Eloquence of the Scribes; but in one of the final chapters, [“The Dance of Inspiration” 263-274] he traces the way inspiration has been conceptualized and theorized throughout time, history and different cultures: “European conceptions are the latest to have found systematic articulation, and to this day, they tend to be laborious in their expression. Asian conceptions are older. More serene than the European. African conceptions are the oldest known; they also tend to be the most steadily centered on the human intellect, away from the lure of divine intervention.”

The European Model

Armah discusses Carl G. Jung and Sigmund Freud and their concept of artistic creativity as being embedded in a form of compensatory neurosis: “a disease, or an attempt to deal with a disease” the artist him/herself being an “aberrant individual, still crazy, still subject to hazy influences and impulses ... and archetypes ... vague, primordial forces, fundamentally important but hard to explain rationally.” Armah includes a quote from Jung who concedes to an earlier claim of the Freudian School that “artists, without exception are narcissistic,” further adding, “Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being as its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. [267-268]

Armah concludes: “It is possible that had Freud and Jung taken a serious look at organizational ideas from a cultural tradition other than the European, they might have seen that the problem lay in a truncated conception of the human psyche.” [269]

The Asian Model

He theorizes Asian inspiration, particularly the Chinese conception, through a discussion of the Tao. The Chinese conception of inspiration, he posits, shifts the issue away from human dependence on divine intervention. “The universe looks superficially like a huge number of unconnected realities (the thousand); but underneath the appearance of multiplicity there is one underlying reality, conventionally called the Tao. Creativity in art and science demands an understanding of reality profound enough to perceive the many and yet to comprehend the one, the Tao. This requires the systematic study both of the world and of the writings and traditions of the ancient sages. Persistent study equips the artist and the thinker to develop their ch'i, or individual talent to the point where it is able to achieve identification with the Tao. ...Contemplation of the Tao is an artistic intellectual practice.” [270]

He continues: "Such study moves artists to the same wave length as the Tao, so that expressions emanating from them match the pulsations of the universe. The harmony of individual talent and cosmic reality becomes so "natural" that spectators observing the artists' work may think it artless, as if in its production no effort were involved." [271]

The African Model

Here, Armah makes an important distinction between African and Asian traditions: “The central role of human initiative in the process of inspiration becomes even clearer when we examine the African conception. While in the Chinese view the ancestors, in the form of mentoring sages, play an important role in bringing the thinking artist into contact with the Tao, in the African conception the aim of the process is not to bring the artist to vibrate on the same wavelength as the universe. It is to train the artist to understand reality through a direct contemplation combined with a study of the work of all ancestral predecessors who left a record of their knowledge. The process of inspiration, in effect, here stands stripped of even the minimal mystical covering of the Chinese Tao. Inspiration comes from the intelligent study of the universe heightened to a systematic way of life … The principal way is study and practice ... The more intense the need for inspiration, the wider the search, the deeper the concentration ... Having nourished itself with insights from the ages, courage from beloved ancestors, and clear-eyed observations of present reality, the creative soul can go to work.” [271,274]

Back to Lauryn.

In the forums, Achali poses two crucial questions to guide the dialogue reignited by Lauryn's latest performance: “Before you dismiss her, ask yourself, what might Lauryn know that I don't, what might Lauryn have seen that I haven't?”

With Armah's breakdown of inspiration in mind, I'll add: What is your inspirational lineage, and how might that inform how you relate to the way in which Lauryn Hill -- or anyone else, for that matter -- manifests their own?

Originally Posted 1/10/2011

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Did the Trayvon Martin Shooting Really Take Place?

2016-10-08T12:00:00.010-04:00

It begins like a scandal. As if a bomb has been dropped on a peaceful, rural setting. In one moment, life as usual; in the next, the resurrection of Jim Crow. The tranquility of yesterday is suddenly pierced by an unthinkable crime. Outrage is seen everywhere. Next come the calls for sobriety and objectivity. The best technologies are implemented to reconstruct the shooting. Massive amounts of speculation and analysis converge on the events. 3-D graphics are used to calculate bullet trajectories. Witnesses are demanded and even if all they have to say is that they heard a gunshot.

Yet none of this has very much to do with serving justice, as it is not the intention of the media to try suspects or protect victims. The media is there to provide entertainment and empty information. This is why—with time—the focus veers away from the concrete to an exultation of the entire situation itself. Proceedings and developments begin tripping over one another as they vie for visibility. The persons involved become stock characters in a melodrama. The passions of the audience are exploited and before long, the underlying issues of racism or criminality become eclipsed by the barrage of information about racism or criminality. The story itself becomes the primary fixation not the issues fueling it similar to when an animal in the path of a speeding car becomes entranced by the luminosity of the headlights, forgetting the reality behind them.

The whole system of news crawls, headlines, 911 tapes, images, interviews, pundits, and protest footage generates a superstructure of confusion. Any conceivability of the original crime becomes ungraspable. A deluge of information yet everything remains tentative and uncertain. We know so much that we know nothing at all. The story exhausts itself; there are no new details, development stalls. The story collapses under its own weight and falls into the sea of the mundane that already surrounds everyday life. It is here that the event loses all significance and becomes merely one more bit of data. Even when the murder is tried successfully in court, the perpetrator found guilty and sentenced accordingly, the implications of the original crime are forgotten. The same is true if the courts fail and let the criminal go free: either we will have already lost all interest or we will riot and then lose all interest. Months later some of us will look back and wonder—did the Trayvon Martin shooting really take place?

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Katherine Dunham / Queen Mother of Dance

2016-10-08T12:00:00.007-04:00

“There’s something powerful about one who can make you know them without ever speaking to you; there’s something divine about one who’s willing to share their body and spirit with the world.”

Who would have known the power and passion that lie in the mind of a young, black, woman from Joliet, Illinois? At 5’6”, 125 pounds, and 21 years old, Katherine Dunham had overcome so much, yet remained full of potential. Born into poverty on June 22, 1909, to a black American father, Albert Dunham, and a French Canadian and American Indian mother, Fanny June Guillaume Taylor, Katherine’s upbringing was rough. Her mother was 20 years her father’s senior and passed away when Katherine was only 5 years old. People in the neighborhood were appalled that Fanny would marry a black man, and once the two started having children, the community did everything from false accusations to throwing bombs at the house to force them to move. However, when Albert began standing guard all night long with his rifle, the neighbors learned that the Dunham family was there to stay.

After Fanny’s death, Albert had a hard time financially maintaining the household. He sent Katherine and her older brother Albert Jr. to stay with his sister Lulu Dunham. While living with her, the children were constantly relocating due to financial crises. Even though this was a time of lack, it was also a time when Katherine began getting exposure to the entertainment world. One cousin they lived with was an actress and used her home for rehearsals; while another cousin took Katherine to shows and introduced her to singers like Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters. She was also introduced to the works of the Cole and Johnson Dance Team.

Finally, Albert Dunham got himself on his feet when he started his own dry-cleaning business and re-married to a woman named Annette. The children returned home and were nurtured by her loyalty, love, and patience. Annette’s presence cushioned the often over-bearing and coldhearted ways of Katherine’s father, who had harbored bitterness ever since his wife had passed away. During high school, Katherine developed a love for performing and sports. However, the disintegration of her family prevented her from partaking in as many activities as she would have liked. Her stepmother left when she couldn’t handle Albert’s harshness any longer, and her older brother (and best friend) Albert Jr. received a scholarship to the University of Chicago. Facing the idea of being left alone with her father, Katherine sought her brother for solace. He promised to save up money to bring her to the University of Chicago. Until then, Katherine tried living with her stepmother, but she was struggling to make ends meet so Katherine began working with her father. This led to his obsessive control over her life. He made her work until she had time for nothing else besides school and work. Even when pursued by men, she was unable to date because her father intimidated them and kept her on such a rigid work schedule.

Once accepted into the University of Chicago, Dunham’s career began because she was liberated from her father’s strict control. Even though she had to deal with the racism of her co-workers while maintaining her grades, she managed to whole-heartedly pursue her passion of dance. At age 21, she started her own dance company with the help of two close friends, Ruth Page and Mark Turbyfill. She called the company Ballet Nègre. However, the company fell apart after the first performance at the Beaux Arts Ball, when no financial support offers came through. Her friends couldn’t afford to keep offering free services needed to keep the company going, and many of the dancers lost interest. After the collapse of the dance company, Dunham discovered another passion: cultural anthropology. Upon hearing a lecture, she became interested in discovering how dance evolved from African and Caribbean cultures. She wanted to explore the necessity and purpose of dance, and how it influenced contemporary dance. While studying with her mentor, Ludmila Speranzeva, Dunham shared her curiosity and desire to link and combine Afro-centric dances to that of ballet and modern. Speranzeva encouraged Dunham to reopen another school based on her fresh ideas and radical theory. This time she named the school the Negro Dance Group. The problem was that during this time, middle-class black Americans didn’t want anything to do with “Negro” culture. While performing a lead role in "La Guiablesse," Dunham caught the attention of Mrs. Alfred Rosenwald Stern from the Rosenwald Fund (a charity established by philanthropist Julius Rosenwald in 1917 to improve black education in the U.S.).

Dunham went to the interview for the fund, and presented her ideas in the form of a colorful, eclectic, and spiritual dance that drew from classical ballet, modern, and African movements. Mesmerized by her performance and breathtaking views on the connection between dance and anthropology, she was granted the money in 1935. This grant enabled her to become a pioneer of American, artistic, dance culture. At 25 years old, she was on her way. She traveled to the West Indies, with a special focus in Haiti, and studied the importance of dance in each culture. These studies gave her insight on contemporary American dance culture and deposited jewels of choreography that kept audiences mystified. In 1940, she formed a highly acclaimed all-black dance troupe that toured her works in the United States and in Europe. Her dance pieces include L'ag'ya (1938), Shango (1945), and the revues Tropical Revue (1943) and Bal Nègre (Black Dance, 1946). She also choreographed for 6 motion pictures and several Broadway shows. Her marriage to blue-eyed, Canadian, John Pratt in 1939 didn’t stop Dunham from living and transfusing her dream into the history of American dance and individuals that studied with her and under her direction. She opened the Dunham School of Dance in New York City in 1945 and became the first black choreographer at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. There she choreographed Aïda (1963-64). In 1952, Dunham and Pratt adopted Marie Christine Columbier from Martinique. The 5-year-old became a beautiful addition to their family and to Dunham’s life.

Dunham’s legacy continues worldwide in the world and history of dance. Her form of dance, known as Dunham technique combines traditional ballet, African rituals, black rhythms, Caribbean and South American native dance, and modern dance. Her technique not only focuses on the incorporation of all these dance forms, but also the articulate movement of certain parts of the body independently from the rest. She has been technical cultural advisor to the president and the minister of cultural affairs of Senegal and started the Performing Arts Training Center in East St. Louis in 1962, where blacks could learn more about African cultural history and participate in living arts. In the 1970s, Dunham became an artist in residence and professor at Southern Illinois University. She started a cultural arts program for disadvantaged youth. She has traveled 57 countries and 6 continents. She has left an indelible impression on the consciousness of all who are exposed to her work, and not only have an appreciation for dance, but an appreciation for culture and life.

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by Asha Taylor {The Liberator Magazine 4.1 #9, 2005}

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Octavia Butler

2016-10-08T12:00:00.006-04:00

With our own way of grasping the meaning of life, the essence of existence, and an understanding of why situations are what they are, we struggle. Each of us deals with this struggle in a different manner: whether it’s through confrontation, creative expression, suppression, or failure to even acknowledge its existence. Often referred to as a kind of literary prophet, Octavia Butler gathers her questions and uncertainties about life into a basket woven of imagination, personal experience, and creativity, to produce stories that attempt to assemble life’s puzzle. She removes the reader from him/herself in order to reveal the perverseness and flaws within certain human idiosyncrasies that are accepted as the norm. Octavia Estelle Butler was born, on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California, the only child of Laurice and Octavia Butler. At an early age, her father passed away, leaving her to be raised by her mother and grandmother. Witnessing her mother’s financial struggle working as a maid, and being shy and lonely as a child, she often daydreamed as a way of coping with the gloom of her and her mother’s reality. She was raised in a racially mixed environment and never faced overt acts of racism; yet, the alienation that she and her family experienced was one that would plague Octavia as a child and birth mind-boggling novels and short stories in her adult years.

Butler suffered from dyslexia, a disability that hindered her academic performance in school; however, she eventually overcame the condition. At the age of 10, she began writing short stories and spending all of her spare time reading. By 13, she was entering writing contests regularly and had discovered her passion for the literary genre of Science Fiction. She attended Pasadena City College and received her Associates Degree in 1968. Around this time, she had become interested in being a freelance writer because she was tired of the numerous blue-collar jobs she had maintained during her college years. Butler’s turning point was attending the Open Door Program of the Screen Writers’ Guild of American and Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop at the University of California in Los Angeles. There, she was encouraged by Harlan Ellison to pursue her passion. Shortly after, she released her debut story “Crossover” in 1971. During this time, she was also working on her novel Kindred, which was published in 1979. After the release of “Crossover” and Patternmaster (1976), the first of her five-volume Patternist Series, she had begun to establish herself in the literary world. Entering a genre that has been historically dominated by the white male presence was like walking on water: something that no one expected or believed was possible. Octavia’s unique style of science fiction has earned her acclaim and respect from numerous critics and authors in the Science Fiction genre and the title of “grande dame of science fiction.” Perhaps the greatest flattery (and success) is the emergence of more African-American authors in science fiction such as Tananarive Due, L.A. Banks, and Nalo Hopkinson: all of whom have drawn inspiration from Butler’s works.

What enables Butler to be the only African-American, female writer to make a living by writing Science Fiction? Why is she one of two notable (the other being Samuel Delaney) African-American authors in Science Fiction? The answer appears simple: the fact that so few African-Americans permeate the realm of science fiction makes Octavia Butler stand out. But it’s more than that. She is an outstanding American writer. Not just an outstanding African-American writer or just an outstanding female writer. Although she is classified as Science Fiction, she conveys the most realistic and basic aspects of humanity in her novels through the exploration of subjects not usually addressed in Science Fiction. Butler delves into the issues of racial inequality, politics, sexuality, sexual identity, and gender through the synthesis of spiritualism, mysticism, mythology, and intellectual explorations of alien perspectives. She writes of the future by interweaving the past with present conditions. In the midst of inexplicable time travel and men giving birth to children, destruction of the earth and the seizure of humans by aliens, Butler uncovers the flaws that lie within the human race… as a whole. This ability has earned her several awards including the James Tiptree Award, Nebula Award, Hugo Award, Locus Award, and the “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation. All from a woman who writes in order to grapple with her difficulty in understanding the world…

Works by Octavia Butler include: From the 5 Volume Patternist Series: Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, Survivor, Wild Seed, Clay’s Ark, From the Earthseed Series: Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, From the Xenogenesis Trilogy: Dawn: Xenogenesis, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, Kindred, Bloodchild and Other Short Stories

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The Healers / "The newness of life's journey continues to find reflections outside of itself, for nothing is new. What comes to our mind as revelation at first, usually reveals itself to be our moment of connection with what is already"

2016-10-08T11:47:00.000-04:00

"After his training the healer walks through the same world every person walks through. But he sees signs others don't see. He hears sounds others don't hear. The same tree that just stands there dumbly to everyone, to the healer its leaves have things to say. The healer learns the meaning of the river's sound, of the sounds of the forest animals ... He who would be a healer must set great value on seeing truly, hearing truly, understanding truly and acting truly ... You see why healing can't be a popular vocation? The healer would rather see and hear and understand than have power over men. Most people would rather have power over men than see and hear ... the healer devotes himself to inspiration ... He also lives against manipulation ... It's a disease, a popular one. If I'm not spiritually blind, I see your spirit. I speak to it if I want to invite you to do something with me. If your spirit agrees it moves your body and your body acts. That's inspiration. But if I'm blind to your spirit I see only your body. Then if I want you to do something for me I force or trick your body into doing it even against your spirit's direction. That's manipulation. Manipulation steals a person's body from his spirit, cuts the body off from its own spirit's direction. The healer is a life-long enemy of all manipulation. The healer's method is inspiration."
-Excerpted from "Part Three: The Inspirers" of The Healers by Ayi Kwei Armah

I cannot find the words to fully capture what the above passage means to me. I do know that, once again, something I know in my soul has revealed itself as already being. It has already been and so I know that it makes sense.

It seems that the newness of life's journey continues to find reflections outside of itself, for nothing is new. What comes to our mind as revelation at first, usually reveals itself to be our moment of connection with what is already. And so, the above passage from The Healers revealed itself to me only recently and yet, it multiplies in significance and speaks to the following:

1. A Healer is someone who trains himself or herself to see. The world around a Healer begins to illuminate itself and the things around him or her become much more clearer.

2. There is a truth involved in the seeing and hearing of things around us. Understanding becomes more important than simply knowing about a thing.

3. A Healer must inspire. The goal of the Healer is to speak to the spirit and inspire the spirit to make changes for the better.

I am still unable to explain where this fits in my world. Not what it means or how it comes to be but how I ended up reaching the road where I would tap into the tradition. I didn't know it until it was over, I didn't realize that so much of what Armah describes above has been a part of my experience and inadvertently, I, too, have experienced some of what it means to be a healer. So much so that I even said it aloud, before I even read this book. So, I was awestruck when I began to read the book and realize that my seemingly random musings weren't so random at all. There is a science to it and I was just beginning to familiarize myself with the surface without even realizing it.

In hindsight, I was never the nature type. Actually, that isn't all the way true. As a child, I really wanted to become a farmer, among other things. Even still, the inclination to examine and experience the natural world wasn't as deliberate. However, a few years ago, something in the woods interrupted the immediacy of my incessantly busy life and all of a sudden The Creator (and the Creations) were alive, in the present, and available to me. No matter what I had (or didn't have enough money to do), I could go sit by a tree or a river and "beam-up" i.e. tune into the earth and the heavens on a deeply spiritual level. One of the Holiest experiences: to sit by something created by the Creator that has its very own way of being and that I can experience just by being within its proximity. A very powerful thing.

Another example: around this same time last year I was running late and missed my bus. I had to wait outside for the next one and happened to be across the street from a park full of trees. I was annoyed at first and then something came to me: I needed to be out to see the trees but they needed to see me too. It was the most random thought in the world. But I knew it was true. From then on my awareness was heightened. The trees were alive.

More recently, I've been interested in the Sequoias and Redwoods. I remember a book I read as a small child which showed how massive these trees are and recently, I rediscovered them. After watching a few documentaries on these special, old, giant trees, I found a new sense of hope. If they can last that long, then we also can last. Even if we are not physically here, we can build things that are lasting enough to mirror the tenacity of these giant forest-dwellers.

What am I saying? A few things, but mainly, that so much of what we do already has a defined and deliberate purpose. Although we know this in theory, it is a whole other thing to connect the dots and really recognize the factors that move us through this world. Very few things are random or by chance. So much of it is ordered and some things are just mere reflections of nature's laws. They are much more calculated than not.

I'm beginning to see the direction in which my life is moving more clearly, even though it has been moving this way for some time. More than this though, by allowing myself to experience higher levels of earthly existence, so much continues to be revealed that, at times, I am in complete awe. And so, an experience here or there begins to manifest as a pattern and the pattern reveals itself to be truth.

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Polygamy. A realistic solution?

2016-10-08T00:46:00.000-04:00

Got an email about Polygamy today from a reader sharing her thoughts on the subject. After reading up on it, she wondered if a modified version of the practice might be an immediate solution to some of the broken homes our communities have.

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She specifically mentioned an example where perhaps a father has children by different women yet those women choose to get along and foster and cultivate their relationships with each other for the purpose of making sure the children feel at home even when they are with their "step" mothers. In fact, I'm sure this type of thing happens pretty regularly already.

I would assume the reverse of this would also be something to consider, although the majority of these type of multi-parent situations that I know of involve woman sharing a common link to one man. But given the incarceration rates (or should I say the unjust incarceration laws) affecting black men, this is no surprise to me.

Like she suggests, I don't think that actually sharing a husband sexually and financially would work in this society unless the practice was shielded by a sub-culture/cult bubble from the mainstream norms. But I can definitely see the fundamental concept -- multi-parents who share a common father or mother making those ties of accountability stronger to each other.

So maybe the women wouldn't all want to get married to a brother, but perhaps they might define for themselves a higher definition or title for the relationship than "baby mama" as to hold each other accountable for each person's and the collective responsibility in raising ALL of the children in the circle, even if they don't belong to a certain individual in the group, they might belong to the group collectively.

Here's what she had to say [I edited out names, etc]:

B, I stumbled upon a blog last week about Polygamy, it's African and biblical origins and as a possible alternative for single parent homes so prevalent today and breakdown of the black family in western culture.

Reading what everyone had to say was really interesting and got me thinking a lot deeper on the subject.

Perhaps a modified version... could be the cure for the destruction of the black family unit in today's society.

At first when I read it, I was like... hell nah, that's some crazy waco cult mess. Then I thought about my current situation...

Neither of us are "married" to him but the three of us are bonded as a parental unit and have the common goal of love, nurturing and growin him into a man... Which in theory loosely resembles a polygamist union. Food for thought...

Some of the stuff... is way out, but the basic idea of it (minus the sharing of a "husband" by more than one woman) can't be ignored as we all strive to regain and redefine the "village" culture in the western society.

I think it would spark an interesting debate for the Liberator blog.

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Tupac = Bob Marley?

2016-10-04T22:42:00.000-04:00

This interview definitely resonates when you retrospectively think of the "icons" in today's music. I'm not confident that anyone in popular music right now is as in-tune with themselves, their actions, the times, and their surroundings as much as Tupac Shakur was. Does that deem today's artists cowardice? Is it because they're Pop? Tupac's music matriculated in and out of pop culture. Is fear a safe argument? Or that today's artists are simply uninformed?

Music has always been known as an ancient medium used to support, strengthen, and transform peoples energies, especially in times of despair, such as during a recession, depression, wave of unemployment, endless war, and of course all of the other things that a sociologist can assure will manifest as a result of a society being struck by the aforementioned conditions.

In high school I read about scientists being able to test the effects on plant growth in an environment where music is played and an environment where there is no music. After numerous tests, it was concluded that the plants exposed to music grew quicker, or proved to carry stronger growth patterns than the plants unexposed to music... of course I'm sure the plants were watered at the same rate, shared an equivalent light intensity.

Applying this to human beings, classical music is said to enhance mathematical apprehension, but there is an increased complexity when considering what's actually being verbalized, because we're then dealing with more than just sound. The sound is more organized and language creates a reality where two sounds can sound the same but mean two entirely different things. Songs are mantras. Some may prove uplifting, others destructive. It's all perception. It all can be dependent on who's listening, or what type of plant is growing. That's the benefit of being a superior species, I guess. Not tryin' to drop science here, I'm just saying. What are we listening too?

As critical as American media and the black bourgeoisie can be about Tupac, it's no question that the guy was not only incredibly intelligent but threateningly prophetic. I was 12 when he died and swore his death was a result of "gangster rap violence"... it rattled my thinking when an elder head whispered to me, "They killed him because he was the next Bob Marley... he was going to be the next Malcolm." Almost 10 years later and in college, I began to see what that really meant.

You know, I got a firm belief in the power of questioning. I think man's ability to question separates her/him from any other known life source, NOT because s/he is upright... someone can still play the upright to decide what sound its going to make and when. So if I do get inked up, it'll probably look something like this:

"How long will they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?"

It's just a question, but we all know some of the most critical lives in the history of civilization were taken simply due to exercising their innate, God-given, human-survival impulse to question.

Originally Posted 4/28/2009

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Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid, m.A.A.d City / "Does everything a proper hip hop album should do: it demands contemplation and reflection"

2016-07-21T06:00:00.000-04:00

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The verdict is still out on whether or not this album will stand next to indisputable classics like Illmatic and All Eyez On Me, but if Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid, m.A.A.d City isn't at least a game-changer, it's no fault of his own. It does everything a proper hip hop album should do: it demands contemplation and reflection. It criticizes itself and the world around it. It's unabashedly idiosyncratic. Unlike most albums dropping these days, I don't feel swindled after taking the time to listen to Good Kid from beginning to end.

Sing About Me, Im Dying of Thirst

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Black Boy Fly

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Perhaps what is most refreshing about this album is that it's forceful without being grandiose. If you want a believable portrait of hood anxiety today, this is the best place to find it. Guns and violence play a role, but no one is sporting paramilitary gear (except maybe the police); alcohol and drugs show up, but there's no Moet or kilograms of cocaine; and there are consequences for leading with one's genitals. Painting his portrait of contemporary Compton, Kendrick is not only honest but also brilliantly unique. His lyrical dexterity (especially in songs like the titular M.A.A.D City) surpasses most of his peers and his ability to remain coherent even as he shifts through styles and tempos is remarkable. He has a penchant for moving from lyrical novelty to pastiche and back again with great ease.

Earlier, I stated that if his album doesn't change the tide of hip hop, Kendrick wouldn't be worthy of blame. He exhibits many of the qualities once championed by the most popular rappers of yesteryear, but today those same qualities have been pushed into the underground.

Bitch, Dant Kill My Vibe

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Money Trees

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To be sure, Kendrick's cadence often carries a knowledgeable and worldly note though it tends to falter before becoming consistently authoritative. I'm thinking here of the song Backstreet Freestyle wherein he wishes for his dick to be as tall as the Eiffel Tower and where a portion of his bars eerily walk the line between Busta Rhymes and Nicki Minaj. I often find that Kendrick can hamper a song's listenability with an overbearing hook. Nevertheless, once the hook is over he always manages to get back to his explosive flows.

Kendrick has given new life to the story-telling style that was once so integral to a rapper's repertoire. In that regard, he can be mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Slick Rick, B.I.G., Eminem, et al.

Poetic Justice

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Swimming Pools (Drank)

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If the West Coast is indeed in the midst of a renaissance, Kendrick Lamar is at the forefront. This album will decide if he is just the king of today's underground or the force that brings integrity and depth back to the mainstream.

Originally Posted 10/25/2012

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The Bitchassness of Toure and These Post-Black Rhetoricians

2016-07-18T11:11:00.000-04:00

A fascinating article by Touré follows this rant. You should read it. It provides a great look into the mind of the modern black afro-capitalist. Maybe you're interested in learning about it so you can be one, or (if you're like me) maybe you're interested in learning about it so you can stay as far away from that mentality as possible. Either way, once you've read that, my take on his piece will make much more sense. My take is here (the article follows):

Just as there were white people who bellowed lofty rhetoric about democracy and equality at the founding of this slave nation, there are black folks who bellow lofty rhetoric about freedom and uplift, whose actions are in stark contrast to the actions that are required to manifest their professed beliefs.

Now that's okay. It doesn't mean all hope is lost. At times, I too belong to this group of black people. As a human, it is impossible to avoid contradiction. So the goal is not to invent a world devoid of contradiction, betrayal or lack of loyalty. That world is impossible. In the English language that impossible world has been called Utopia. I do not want to live there.

Instead, my goal is to refuse to be silent about my individual hypocrisy in order to constantly improve. As a living organism, I think that's pretty much our call of duty, to improve, and to do so as consistently as possible. As such, I believe it should be our collective goal to refuse to be silent about our collective hypocrisy, so that collectively we can improve most efficiently. I believe that we should all refuse to silence the voices among us, or within us, that call us to be consistent in our commitments to our beliefs, and that urge us to manifest the appropriate action to get free. That doesn't guarantee us a world in which we'll always be consistent in our commitments, rather, at best, it guarantees us a world in which we'll always have vocal reminders telling us to get our asses back on track.

Bottom line: humans need reminders to stay on track and live up to their expectations and commitments. Without reminders we are guaranteed to fail. With reminders, we aren't guaranteed to win, but the odds are much better.

What Toure seems to be doing in this here article is that -- instead of accepting that he too needs a reminder in order to stay committed to the ideals of his ancestors -- he's simply justifying his transgressions as the "natural" evolution of our collective experience as black folks in America. To him the election of Barack Obama is proof that this evolution has worked. That the new-black that has evolved into post-black has proven its worthiness and effectiveness by electing a black president, something that the "old, angry, revolutionary" black couldn't do.

To him, post-black means getting over the ugliness of blackness and instead "get past" that to what lies ahead. But for Toure -- judging by the way he not only praises this black bourgeoisie story, but also the way in which he recommends that we learn from this fiction and apply it to our reality -- he really believes that "what lies ahead" is a blackness that has no "threatening" ties to Africa, and a blackness that essentially "succeeds" financially and materially by being non-threatening to the established power structure in America. Work hard and you can have a comfortable life, where instead of obsessing about blackness and white supremacy, you can ponder the meaning of life -- you know, the artistic stuff that only white people get to do. If you have grievances, use the civil rights methodology and we'll eventually be granted whatever we need by the power structure. Cause, see, it got us a black president! Yay! So there's nothing really wrong with the structure, we just have to know how to work it! So come on black people! Get out of your mental ruts, and "Just do it!" "Do You!" "Yes we can!", etc., etc.

Where I disagree, is that for many of our collective ancestors, "succeeding" never meant "doing well off" in the white man's world. No, "succeeding" means being ourselves in our own context, under our own rules. Self determination at all costs. And we trust those rules, not because we are romantics, but because we have historians and our historians tell us that these rules worked for tens of thousands of years. They worked. Yes, they worked not without struggle and conflict and hard times. But they worked nevertheless. And further, they kept us in GENERAL harmony with our Earth, with our peer living creatures, and with our fellow humans. Period.

I refuse to accept Toure's premise that "success" for black folks in this American project means reaping "equal" benefits from the rape of the rest of the world. I refuse to accept that protest and exercising our "legal" voice, granted to us by the rapist, is all we need to change the world.

That's like the coward in the room when someone is being raped, seeing success as getting a turn, instead of stopping the entire fucked up game being played at the expense of another human being. And, at best, Toure kicks us a liberal interpretation where he's the person in the room who puts up a protest.

But he can't go so far as being the one who calls the damn cops or better yet, the one who kicks the asses of the other people in the room getting ready to take their turn, even if they are his childhood buddies. No, that's too "radical".

Toure portrays those of us who refuse to abandon our "reminders" (of who we are) as if we are holding on to grievances that are played out. Who gives a fuck about the grievances? This war is about US, and keeping true to who we are, it ain't about "them" or a hate for "them". Who has time to dwell on hate? If anyone, certainly the minority among us. The majority among us, have ALWAYS been driven by a LOVE for our own people, our own families, our own friends.

While it may be true that among individuals our individual drama and internal personality conflicts sometimes have sidetracked the larger community (think Black Panther Party vs. Ron Karenga's "US" organization or vs. the Black Liberation Army), it is entirely false when it comes to the struggles that black families and communities have endured in general. Meaning: the conflicts are the exception playa. Any elementary student of African history will tell you that the rule is that we ride or die together. Always have, always will.

As I've shared in discussion about Urban Maroonage on this site (link), my family and upbringing proved to me that it was possible to disengage with this society's values, while also providing a safe and healthy upbringing for your children. In other words, being revolutionary does not mean suffering, it just means being bold enough to secure your stability without having to play the game of exploitation promoted by this system. So the false class argument that all the reactionary revolutionaries are angry folks too focused on angry rhetoric to be able to to provide their children with college funds, health insurance, and -- as Toure puts it -- vacation paradises "where life doesn’t assault... but rather affords the time to figure out who [one] is", is a bullshit argument.

Plenty of families and communities have found ways to provide the type of stability for their children that allowed their kids "the time to figure out" who they are. By aspiring to resist this society's values you do not automatically sacrifice your children's well being. In itself, it is no harder to provide your kids a stable upbringing when you are resisting this society than when you are acquiescing. The only difference is that when you take a stand, you sometimes have to face the added barrier of a reactionary society that is easily threatened by free, self-determining people. But if we are too cowardice to seek that, then what are we living for?

Toure's diatribe against this imagined "black" obsession, that has supposedly plagued black people for too long, is totally a slap and spit in the face of those families and communities who have, through tireless endurance, resisted the tempting material fruit of acquiescence and "capitalist success", in order to honor and preserve in their very life-efforts (efforts at living), the identity and way of life of our ancestors. I'm talkin about everyone from Mumia (who sits in what amounts to a modern day whipping shed (death row used as a political tool to intimidate the rest of us uppity Negroes into remaining non-threatening to the power structure, or else) to the very community that raised me.

Toure acts like this has all been a "strategy" in "gaining access and success". This is not a strategy, resistance to the destructive nature of white supremacy and capitalism is a way of life to all who want to live in a sustainable world. My folks have chosen their life proactively and on principle, not just reactively in order to merely "get something" -- even if that something is power. By raising children who aren't afraid of their African history and aren't afraid to represent that identity and legacy in an oppressive white society is not reactionary. It is merely a more honest way of living, especially when compared to the way of life practiced by those among us who choose to repress our historical identities in order to "get ahead", whatever that means.

As my friend reminded me, I'm not even sure why I'm upset though. Because Toure -- nothing like baba Kwame, or his namesake Sekou Toure -- is himself a bourgeoisie black man repressing his ancestral identity and betraying the efforts of what I consider to be the best of us, so that he can publish a few books and appear on BET as a so-called "legitimate" voice to modern black America. How could I expect anything more from someone who has deposited checks from Viacom?

Well, despite what the "hater-haters" think, there really is that much hope that brothers like Toure will one day come around and use their enormous reach to engage our people in dialogue that really matters -- dialogue that revolves around how we can and will continue to go about the re-capturing of stolen identities and legacies that are the key to us being who we need to be in whatever time and place we find ourselves in. Dialogue that is more about figuring out where we are and where we go from here, than it is about trying to "get ahead" in the very system that we are slave-alumni of. But of course that takes a proper understanding of the history of African social movements in America. Brother Cedric Robinson wrote a book about it, wanna here it? Here it go (link).

Of course, it's much more lucrative to make a living publishing books about what essentially amounts to your "adventures in black Hollywood". Blah.

(NY Times) Visible Young Man: Now that we’ve got a post-black president, all the rest of the post-blacks can be unapologetic as we reshape the iconography of blackness. For so long, the definition of blackness was dominated by the ’60s street-fighting militancy of the Jesses and the irreverent one-foot-out-the-ghetto angry brilliance of the Pryors and the nihilistic, unrepentantly ghetto, new-age thuggishness of the 50 Cents. A decade ago they called post-blacks Oreos because we didn’t think blackness equaled ghetto, didn’t mind having white influencers, didn’t seem full of anger about the past. We were comfortable employing blackness as a grace note rather than as our primary sound. Post-blackness sees blackness not as a dogmatic code worshiping at the altar of the hood and the struggle but as an open-source document, a trope with infinite uses.

The term began in the art world with a class of black artists who were adamant about not being labeled black artists even as their work redefined notions of blackness. Now the meme is slowly expanding into the wider consciousness. For so long we were stamped inauthentic and bullied into an inferiority complex by the harder brothers and sisters, but now it’s our turn to take center stage. Now Kanye, Questlove, Santigold, Zadie Smith and Colson Whitehead can do blackness their way without fear of being branded pseudo or incognegro.

So it’s a perfect moment for Whitehead’s memoiristic fourth novel, “Sag Harbor,” a coming-of-age story about the Colsonesque 15-year-old Benji, who wishes people would just call him Ben. He’s a Smiths-loving, Brooks Brothers-wearing son of moneyed blacks who summer in Long Island and recognize the characters on “The Cosby Show” as kindred spirits. “According to the world we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses. A paradox to the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange about it. It was simply who we were,” Whitehead writes. “What you call paradox, I call myself.” For Benji’s family, confident of progress, the black national anthem is “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now.”

Benji is a nerdy, easily embarrassed teenager, still in braces, whose attempt to become his own person is seen in his efforts to pull away from Reggie, his younger brother and longtime shadow. Like so many adolescents in life and in literature, Benji is trying to figure out who he is but doesn’t quite know where to look. We see him flow through a summer in Sag Harbor, that section of the Hamptons where many black doctors and lawyers have homes, and follow him from Memorial Day (when he’s waiting for the rest of his little crew to arrive from the city) to Labor Day (when the lawn mowers go quiet). It’s the summer of 1985 — the hip-hop sex symbol Lisa Lisa comes into the ice cream store where Benji works, and New Coke is introduced to hell-frozen-over dismay: “It was inconceivable, like tampering with the laws of nature. Hey, let’s try Gravity-Free Tuesdays.” Whitehead’s delicious language and sarcastic, clever voice fit this teenager who’s slowly constructing himself. “Sag Harbor” is not “How I became a writer”; there’s no hint of Benji’s destiny beyond his sharp-eyed way of looking at things, his writerly voice and his desire to provide a historical and sociological context for blacks in the Hamptons. Still, with the story meandering like a teenager’s attention, the book feels more like a memoir than a traditional plot-driven novel. It’s easy to come away thinking not much happens — Whitehead has said as much — but “Sag Harbor” mirrors life, which is also plotless. It’s an inner monologue, a collection of stories about a classic teenage summer where there’s some cool stuff and some tedium and Benji grows in minute ways he can’t yet see.

Benji lives in a world not unlike Charlie Brown’s, where adults are mostly offstage. His parents work in the city all week, visiting on weekends, so Benji’s social life reaches its apex on Thursdays, when all the “ill” stuff goes down. Of course, Benji and his crew aren’t terribly raucous: the illest thing to happen is a BB gun war, where guess-who gets shot in the eye. This leads to one of the book’s tensest scenes, as Benji tries to extricate the BB with “old-fashioned razor blades, the ones people use to kill themselves.” He fails.

Whites are mostly offstage too, but for these characters, as for many blacks in the upper middle class, there’s a constant worry about the white gaze. “You didn’t, for example, walk down Main Street with a watermelon under your arm. Even if you had a pretty good reason. Like, you were going to a potluck and each person had to bring an item and your item just happened to be a watermelon, luck of the draw, and you wrote this on a sign so everyone would understand the context, and as you walked down Main Street you held the sign in one hand and the explained watermelon in the other, all casual, perhaps nodding between the watermelon and the sign for extra emphasis if you made eye contact. This would not happen. We were on display.”

Still, even in successful and ambitious post-black families, kids are taught in no uncertain terms not to take any mess from whites. An undercurrent of abuse in Benji’s house — Dad insults Mom in front of her friends, for example — spills over when Benji doesn’t challenge a boy who drags a finger down his cheek and says, “Look — it doesn’t come off.” When his father learns that Benji didn’t punch the boy, he surmises that Benji was afraid of being punched back. So he uses shock therapy: “His fast fast hand struck me across the face and iron rolled around in my head and my cheek pulsed with heat and felt like it had swollen up to twice its size.” Benji’s father punches him in the face again and again, each time demanding, “Can he hit you harder than this?” Through most of “Sag Harbor” Benji learns and grows very little, but here the moral is unmistakable: “The lesson was, Don’t be afraid of being hit, but over the years I took it as, No one can hurt you more than I can.” He goes back and punches the boy in the face.

The autobiography has been an integral part of African-American literature since before Frederick Douglass. Most examples — Richard Wright’s “Black Boy,” Claude Brown’s “Manchild in the Promised Land,” Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Kody Scott’s “Monster” — could have been subtitled “My Journey Out of Hell.” They document the horror of being black and enslaved or segregated or impoverished or imprisoned. But Whitehead’s Benji starts with tremendous class advantages and summers in a vacation paradise where life doesn’t assault him but rather affords him the time to figure out who he wants to be. Benji may be an outlier, but he is not alone. It’s time for us to hear more post-black stories like his. (source)

Originally Posted 5/6/2009

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Loneliness

2015-11-30T17:29:00.000-05:00

Nobody on TV is ever lonely. Well maybe, but not for long. And even if their predestined company didn’t come join them at just the right time they would still have us.

The actors, the people on TV know that we're going to be watching them. In a strange way they at least know that their presence will be recognized by an audience. They aren’t lonely. They intend for their presence to be recognized and it is. We, the viewer, on the other hand, just choose randomly which people to watch. But similarly, prostitutes don’t get rid of loneliness: their presence, like ours to the actors, goes unrecognized.

Ultimately, why are people lonely? Do we not like ourselves enough? What is it inside of the human spirit that yearns to be in the company of another? What is it that yearns to be genuinely recognized, to be befriended and, perhaps, loved?

Is loneliness a plague?

A wife sits at home alone. A meal sits cooked on the stove. Her plate, her fork. Her cup sits in the sink.

A young man sits in front of music television in the afternoon, lonely, looking to cure it; hoping that a virtual young woman can keep him company. A young woman sits in front of music television late at night, lonely, watching romantic movies, original soundtrack and all, three-and-a-half-minutes each.

This isn’t the kind of loneliness that simply means to be without companions. It's good to be alone sometimes. We all trap ourselves around others to get away from ourselves. What better protection than a circle of companions? Sometimes -- often times, even one will do the trick.

But this is number "3a" on the dictionary's list: to be "dejected by the awareness of being alone." This is when you realize that you're alone, completely involuntarily, not for growth's or peace's sake, and it has the ability to make one miserable. In fact, according to that definition, loneliness is experienced precisely at that moment when we become miserable from being alone.

What are 1a, 1b and 2 by the way? One might be wondering. Well, those ones all have to do merely with the state of being alone. You know, "without companions" or "unfrequented by people."

"Unfrequented?" Interesting.

Let's see, the obvious would be to blame an individualistic, isolating, and extremely competitive American culture. We don’t want to go there, do we? For the sake of balance… it seems that in the modern day, our numerous forms of one-way forms of communication contribute to our being alone. Interestingly enough, they alone do not make us lonely. However, we often spend so much time engaged in these one-way conversations that we become addicted, in a sense, to them. When we look up from our TVs, our computers… damn that Google and all of its instant gratification in the form of instant answers, preventing us from talking with our elders and friends!… when we look up from these things and realize how alone we have become, well, that can make us very lonely. Or should it be: damn that ultra-competitive American culture that makes Google and its instant gratification in the form of instant answers so very necessary!

And we could call that luxury loneliness. We could tell those people to quit crying and give them no sympathy at all. It really doesn’t sound that cruel of a thing to do when compared to the loneliness brought on by incarceration, orphanages, foster homes, and homelessness.

The word "involuntarily" is elusive. What does it mean to be in a house and feel like you are being forced to be alone? Are psychological restraints really more restraining than their physical counterparts? In one instance, you have the power to get free. In the other, someone else has it -- and is definitely not giving it to you. Do the words "spoiled" and "unappreciative" (of one's relative freedom) apply here? Then again, all freedom is relative. (Oops I put that in parentheses; it was supposed to be a whisper type deal.) Did I say that out loud? A lot of one-way communication going on here, too, I guess. Is reading this any healthier than TV? Do you feel lonely right now? Sorry.

The point is that it is interesting what we can do when we know that someone else has it worse. It is interesting that knowing that sometimes serves as motivation.

Those incarcerated -- the ones reading this and the ones who're not -- get lonely, I can almost guarantee that simply by using my god given telepathy -- empathy. Those who're homeless, those who are waiting for a new family or perhaps a first family, these are those who seem to be truly lonely -- in a truly involuntary state of aloneness. And of course, not all are, and of course, those who are, aren’t all the time. But those who are, when they are, are so because their circumstances prevent them from being otherwise.

Are you lonely, or just scared of the world around you -- scared of you?

And so we realize the effectiveness of putting one in solitary confinement. You can't just make up a friend, or just be content. No, you're lonely, and it hurts. And so we realize the daily fate of the invisible man. He's lonely, and it hurts.

Maybe tomorrow, if I see someone who looks lonely, I'll stop and say "hi" and [ask] "how are you doing?" Better yet, I'll mean it.

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive}
Kasoro, B. H. (2005). Loneliness. The Liberator Magazine #9 (4.1).

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The Greatest Love Song Ever / Stevie Wonder’s Key of Life

2015-10-08T12:00:00.000-04:00

Let me summarize in 1960s sci-fi terms: Stevie Wonder (Steveland Morris) set out on a “mission” like a “mad scientist” to “invent” the “greatest love song” ever. After the rise of the gangsta rap aesthetic, it should sound strange to a twenty-something in the year 2007 to imagine a time in pop music when self-described Black recording artists (with a capital B) would compete against each other with love songs. Just imagine gangs of Black dudes trying to out love one another! What is sad is that today’s youth would more accept the possibility of a singer or a rapper competing with knowledge of ballistics, vehicles, jewelry or food rather than this thing called “love.”

So, back in the day, Stevie Wonder lived and thrived in what is now the ‘alien’ world of the “love” song. And when Songs in the Key of Life was released September 1976, the opinion here is that our “mad scientist” achieved his goal in the form of a song called “As” (on CD disk 2, track 6). You see, one too many self-described Black pop artists in the 1970s put on African costumes and inconvenient disco boots—but few barely could see the nature of African consciousness. The poetic irony is that a blind man in America could catch a glimpse of the ancient African Old Kingdom. When you need the white executive summary of what ancient Africa was all about, the short answer is this: Africa was about the complex, technical challenge of populating the Earth in a responsible manner. So ‘we’ properly-trained Americans know about the “great” Space Race—‘we’ even accept the slang “rocket scientist” without a thought. Well, the great-society mission of our Africans of the Old Kingdom was being fruitful and multiplying.

You have to read his lyrics to understand that Stevie Wonder is not singing about sexual intercourse. His powerful ancient message is that “loving” you is correct—quintessentially righteous.

Since it seems so easy for say, roaches or other vermin to breed and multiply ‘we’ as imperial minions may erroneously assume that developing humans from scratch is easy, simple—something “dumb” animals do. This is an imperial assumption because it is relatively easy to invade a preexisting “enemy” territory with indigenous, developed civilization, murder all the guys and steal all the girls. But what happens when there is no one ‘else’ to steal from? What do you do when you come from a cultural memory that is so ancient that there was no revolutionary concept of the ‘other’? What happens is sort of like the “love” that Stevie Wonder sang about in his song “As.” You have to read his lyrics to understand that Stevie Wonder is not singing about sexual intercourse. His powerful ancient message is that “loving” you is correct—quintessentially righteous. To not “love” you means nature, itself, is no longer existing as that which was previously set in place. No so-called “love” means the universe no longer ‘knows’ itself. Stevie Wonder begins:

As around the sun the earth knows she’s revolving.
And the rosebuds know to bloom in early May.
Just as hate knows love’s the cure,
you can rest your mind assured
that I’ll be loving you always.

As now can’t reveal the mystery of tomorrow.
But in passing will grow older every day.
Just as all is born is new.
Do know what I say is true,
that I’ll be loving you always.

Until the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky—always
until the ocean covers every mountain high—always
until the dolphin flies and parrots live at sea—always
until we dream of life and life becomes a dream.

Since the language you are reading now intends to inherit from Greek “genius,” we should remember that the Greek language has about five words for different kinds of “love.” Your local, Baptist pastor might have let you know about agape “love.” Certainly, Stevie Wonder knew he had to clarify himself on this “love” thing. So he goes on to say:

Did you know that true love asks for nothing?
Her acceptance is the way we pay.
Did you know that life has given love a guarantee
to last through forever and another day?

When my eye sees “life has given love a guarantee,” a reference to Biological Altruism pops out. This casual intersection between so-called “art” and science makes this “art” work more powerful to me—and more educational for young people. This is a far cry from hollow-point/mercury-tipped bullets and Cristal!

Now, Stevie Wonder, in the tradition of the Blues goes on to repeat himself as his song continues. But, as in the wise tradition of the Blues, each successive repetition is different (this is the unity of changing changelessness—the Unmoved Mover). No digital sampling loops here! So, in addition to expressing the correctness of his “love,” in his next succession he reveals his awareness of himself and his mortality:

Just as time knew to move on
since the beginning
and the seasons know exactly
when to change.

Just as kindness knows no shame,
know through all your joy and pain
that I’ll be loving you always.

As today I know I’m living
but tomorrow
could make me the past
—but that I mustn’t fear.
For I’ll know deep in my mind,
the love of me I’ve left behind,
’cause I’ll be loving you always…

It would not surprise me to find that Stevie Wonder was directly inspired by Martin Luther King, his speech, when he says at the Mason Temple in Memphis, “I might not get there with you, but I want you to know, tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land!” Remember that Stevie Wonder lived in a time when a man like Martin Luther King was a part of pop culture. In this time of Rupert Murdoch, this historical fact must be seen as impossibility. So it’s only natural that Wonder would ‘answer’ this King impossibility by saying, “I mustn’t fear… The love of me I’ve left behind…” Once Stevie Wonder begins to ‘speak beyond the grave’—that is, have an open, honest (and relatively courageous) relationship with his mortality, a traditional African conversation begins.

But Stevie Wonder knows that he is talking to a traditionally oppressed people with these lyrics. Yes, his music is meant for “everyone”—but when he poly-rhythmically interjects, “Did you know that you’re loved by somebody?” in the middle of talk about the gravitational pull on “trees and seas” and elementary mathematical expressions, he is addressing the suffering of an oppressed people using Baptist-church-style choir leading (ministering) that is very Black and very much from the African experience in America:

Until the day is night and night becomes the day—always
until the trees and seas just up and fly away—always
until the day that 8×8×8 is 4—always
until the day that is the day that are no more—

Did you know that you’re loved by somebody?

Until the day the earth starts turning right to left—always
until the earth just for the sun denies itself—

I’ll be loving you forever.

Until dear Mother Nature says her work is through—always
Until the day that you are me and I am you—always

Eventually, the repetition of the word “always” inspires Stevie Wonder to make the sound of the word take on the meaning of the word. This, again, is very African (and may sound weird to a modern European ear trained in the “classical” sense of the ordered, sedate music commissioned by the imperial elites without Mozart, Beethoven or Mahler). The strong opinion here is that it does not respect Stevie Wonder, his work, enough to simply try to write out how he sings the word “always”—it is best for you to be there in the song to listen to what he means. Stevie Wonder is singing for an organized purpose beyond demonstrating that he is capable of singing. The previous sentence may seem obvious but too many pop singers forget this option.

And when we listen we notice that the chorus ‘behind’ Stevie Wonder is dominated by Black female voices. My ignorant guess is that Stevie Wonder used this design because of “dear Mother Nature” mentioned earlier. When we discover that my ignorance is actually accurate then we have yet another example of a Black man ‘accidentally’ drawing from his ancient African roots. Because the wisdom of the Old Kingdom tells us that all matter is of female. And, when we dig for a deep and profound effect, we may uncover that the form sitting next to the throne is female—and this throne represents phenomenal consciousness itself. Now dig this: the symbol of the woman next to the throne is an Old Kingdom word with a sound that almost sounds like “As,” the title of Stevie Wonder’s song! But let me stop my indulgent digression as Stevie Wonder’s “As” lyrics continues. He gets very low down to urban earth, addressing my traditionally oppressed people directly:

We all know
sometimes life’s hates and troubles
can make you wish you were born
in another time and space.

But you can bet your life
times that and twice its double
that God knew exactly where
he wanted you to be placed.

So make sure when you say
you’re in it but not of it
you’re not helping to make this Earth
a place sometimes called “Hell.”

It’s seems to be a fad over the last few post-modern years to find prototypical examples of hip hop and rapping. Many credit James Brown, Teena Marie and many others from before the 1990s. And here comes Stevie Wonder in 1976 with his unique outburst of rapping that is punctuated with the incredible rapid-fire staccato in, “You’re not helping to make this Earth a place sometimes called Hell.” Again, of course, you have to hear it to respect it justly.

And because Stevie Wonder is so, well, wonderful, we may forget that there can be a great deal of psychological trauma associated with being blind. This should put more weight upon the words, “God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed.” Would not many a blind man question his God for “making” him blind? So there has to be more going on here. And what follows next is definitely, profoundly more:

Change your words into truths
and then change that truth into love.
And maybe our children’s grandchildren
and their great-great grandchildren will tell.

These words represent the heart of the message in “As.” The hard work of the song ends here. The rest of the music is a celebration of itself. The exquisite orderly arrangement simply functions according to the established rules from here. This is the divine by-product of what ‘we’ call creativity. Why should the hard work end here? What just happened? For me, what just happened is with the question, ‘How can our distant descendants (our great-great grandchildren) tell that we “love” them?’ Another, similar question would be, ‘How can our distant descendants tell that we understood and incarnated universal/natural law?’

In a Western imperial context, this question is a mere rhetorical luxury item to throw away at the end of some eulogy, novel or play. It is a quaint candy of fleeting nobility. But when you are faced with the real problem of developing humans from scratch this question needs a real answer. In the Old Kingdom of Africa, the answer is literally on a monumental scale—and this is all I’m going to write about this right now so that we don’t get too far away from Stevie Wonder’s reality. His song is a modern monument to his sincere concern for our descendants of the human family general—and definitely the African family in particular (which sounds redundant from a particular musical point of view). Would you dare to answer the question that Stevie Wonder implicitly proposed over 20 years ago: ‘How can our distant descendants tell that we “love” them?’

I daresay that most of ‘us’ are more likely to ask a relatively selfish question no healthy child should ever ask, “Do you love me?” But within Stevie Wonder’s weird, alien, “love” song, such a question means about two things: the person asking the question is disconnected from nature (the universe) and in this naked insecurity must ask such a question—or the person is asking the question of a person who is similarly naked. Such a situation of nakedness leads me to Genesis 3:11 with a Divine Voice asking, “Who told thee that thou wast naked?” Most of ‘us’ cannot answer that divine question because what we listen to is not always noticed or remembered—for the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field (the Africans of the Old Kingdom established a symbolic relationship between a kind of serpent and the act of listening—weird eh? And another kind of serpent is associated with what ‘we’ now know as a manifestation of “evil.” Nature teaches us that there is more than one kind of serpent…).

Definitely, being “in it but not of it” does not help as this achieves disconnected individualism that blocks out any authentic concern for any distant descendants (or any ancient ancestors for that matter). Clearly, ‘us’ having no concern at all for even the basic laws of the natural world makes Stevie Wonder’s song ineffective and useless—and when I try to count the number of “nature lovers of color,” I keep coming up short. Right about now, most Black folks are caught up in an urban game in a jungle of concrete that is often confused with ancient stone. And what Black people in particular do, most people in general will do. This is why there are rock-n-roll bands in China, Jazz clubs in Amsterdam and hip-hop concerts in Istanbul.

Now imagine someone in an intimate moment around 1976 compelled to ask Stevie Wonder, “Do you love me?” What? Didn’t this person get a little from his message distributed by a record company all over the U.S.? Either, this famous musician is a terrible hypocrite or the person that got close enough to ask Stevie the question is a complete idiot! In such an imagined situation, we may begin to understand why Stevie Wonder might say to you that being world famous and called a “musical genius” gets tiring and sometimes quite lonely and painful when few or no one will engage you on the level of your creative expression. Surely, for a Black man like Stevie Wonder, artistic expression is meant to be communication—a conversation—not an ivory-tower lecture. (However, I reserve the right to be wrong about this…)

Would you dare to answer the question that Stevie Wonder implicitly proposed over 20 years ago: ‘How can our distant descendants tell that we “love” them?’

This incredible distance from Stevie Wonder’s highest esoteric achievements breeds a lack of serious, intimate study of Stevie Wonder the artist. As of this writing, the only contemporary book that looks remotely promising is Stevie Wonder: Rhythm of Wonder by Sharon Davis. Surely there must have been more than a few archived magazine articles from back in the days when Stevie Wonder was a “new sensation” saved somewhere… I refuse to believe that there are not more serious studies out there…

By the way, our study of the African Old Kingdom informs us that there was no word for what ‘we’ now call “love.” Sounds harsh, cold, inscrutable—non-Shakespearean? Certainly you may somehow read something translated from the Old Kingdom that uses the word “love” but transliteration is different from translation. Stevie Wonder can explain so directly with his song “As” why there would be no need to have a word, “love.” In “As,” Stevie Wonder tells us that to not “love” means the universe is no longer functioning correctly. So what’s the point of having a word for it? Are we planning for a day that is the day of no more? Don’t we have better things to do than to get ready for the end of doing? What can you do when all existence ends?

To see the use of “love” as a rhetorical loophole for justifying and indoctrinating “hate” definitely should seem very strange to a native English speaker. It also makes no sense to a “normal” person (who assumes the dialectical is natural) to imagine that a world without the word “love” might possibly be all “love” (this gives new meaning to the hip-hop-era quip, “It’s all good.”). And a world of all “love” is kind of like an Eden… What! Just imagine gangs of Black dudes trying to out love one another… So it’s best to stop these words now before it gets so “weird” that even Stevie Wonder won’t want to follow me…

But it must be said that “As” is truly the “greatest love song” I have ever claimed to understand. It transcends the boundaries of romantic, traditional “love,” making a “love” beyond “love.” I would dare to call this work authentic Christian music, a family stone without the ligaments for concrete religion.

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}
by Bryan Wilhite (The Liberator Magazine #21)

Originally Posted 9/25/2007

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The Healing of Òsányìn / "Learning our herbs ... to extract the healing properties of plants for our bodies' benefit"

2015-10-05T14:38:00.000-04:00

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Sawdayah Brownlee {Brooklyn, New York}

Òsányìn Èrí Máā Awo. A Wè Lító Sú Máā Àdó.

Òsányìn or Osayin is habitual evidence of mystery. We wash to possess the training to always sow medicine gourds. (A praise song to Òsányìn)

"Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own."
-Dr. Wangari Maathai, Maa Kherw*

The Healing of Òsányìn: Home Remedies and Learning Our Herbs

Òsányìn is the Orisa, borne from the Yoruba faith Ifá, that manifests himself as the "maintenance of health and the prevention and alleviation of physical, spiritual, and mental disease" and resides in "the forest, mother of clouds, grandmother of rain, keeper of the earth, and protector of respirating life."** Humankind’s parables of the earth and her fruits and its relationship with people has always been symbiotic. Therefore, it should not be a foreign concept for the individual to heal herself with her environment.

The idea of using the earth to heal wounds and pains indefinable by anyone except the afflicted is one that early (wo)man began and has continued since our existence, becoming more "sophisticated" with time. This sophistication, however, is one that in many cases is unnecessary and fueled by profit. The pharmaceutical industry is such an example. The source of efficacy for many painkillers, anti-inflammatories, and antidepressants prescribed to patients from their physicians comes from a plant. While this industry ridicules homeopathy and home remedies and attempts to convince the consumer that herbs are either highly toxic or have no healing power at all, its roots lie in the recipes for teas, salves, and tinctures, shared amongst the oldest of cultures, of ancient herbal medicine. (The largest difference are the chemical compounds created in labs -- most often for copyright purposes -- that make up most pharmaceutical and over-the-counter drugs.)

The connection between Òsányìn and those called to the vocation of agriculture or simply searching for more direct ways to heal themselves is a link available to all. Approaching the earth in a respectful manner, we all have the ability to extract the healing properties of plants for our bodies' benefit. In turn, with the organic act of harvesting by hand, we help in restoring the soil to a better state.

Revolutionizing the way you live is a difficult process when surrounded by "cheap" alternatives that (you have been conditioned to think) taste better. While we struggle for a holistic, healthy lifestyle, here are some common herbs and weeds, that you can find in your kitchen, back yard, or park, which are highly effective for general health and specific ailments -- and always free. Because herbs can be deadly when used in the wrong form or dosage or mistaken for a poisonous look-a-like you should consult a guide*** or a licensed herbalist/knowledgeable person on herbs. Exhibit caution where you pick due to pollution and toxic chemical wastes where some weeds reside.

Below are a few common herbs and weeds used for healing:

Dandelion
A common weed throughout the U.S., its roots can be made into a tonic for kidney & liver problems. It is also used to treat acne, abscesses, and bacterial infections. The flower, leaves, and roots can be used for medicinal purposes. Dandelion root capsules (made from gelatin) are common in most grocery/produce stores. If you are allergic to gelatin or do not consume pork products do not ingest gelatin capsules.

Goldenrod
Another common weed throughout the U.S. in fields resembling gold-tinged wheat, its healing properties are akin to another potent weed, goldenseal. It can be used as an astringent, as it is anti-fungal (and anti-inflammatory), as well as for issues of the digestive, respiratory, and urinary systems.

Ragweed
While this weed is notorious for inciting harsh allergic reactions and hayfever, it also possesses many health benefits. This herb can be made into a tincture to extract its healing powers of "regulating the liver", which "stimulates gastric flow and can cleanse the appendix."

Basil
This popular cooking herb strong in flavour is also strong against parasites and bacteria. Its oil is effective in killing intestinal parasites, treating acne, and boosts the immune system by stimulating growth of antibodies.

Red and White Clover
This weed is now used throughout the world as a cover crop and/or pasture crop for its ability to infuse the soil with nitrogen. Recorded as first used by Cherokee, Algonquin, Iroquois, & other indigenous American populations as a treatment for the common cold, fevers, and coughing, the herb has been validated by chemists as a preventative measure against symptoms of the common cold and syphillis.

Read more on common herbs and weeds used medicinally: natureskills.com, ecosalon.com, "The Healing Herbs: The Ultimate Guide to the Curative Power of Nature’s Medicines" by Michael Castleman, "The Herbal Medicine-Maker’s Handbook: A Home Manual" by James Green. -END-

--Notes--
* English translation: "True of voice"

** "Four New World Yoruba Rituals" by John Mason

*** "A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants: Eastern & Central North America" by Steven Foster and James A. Duke is a thorough book with coloured pictures and detailed explanations.

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Pre-blackness, Blackness & Post-Blackness / 195,000 b.c. to Today

2015-10-05T14:35:00.000-04:00

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Michael J. Wilson {Brooklyn, New York}

The first recognizably black humans began appearing in Africa around 200,000 years ago. Some 50,000 years later, they began to engage in the more refined human behaviors including sophisticated tool and jewelry making, painting, sculpture, and the control of fire. About 5,000 years ago, Menes became the the planet's first king of a nation-state that maintained its dominance and prominence until 30 B.C. For the next 500 years or so, various kingdoms and states appeared throughout the African continent. We might consider this time span as playing host to "pre-blackness"--not because early man or the ancient Egyptians did not posess dark skin but because their complexions had not yet been thoroughly politicized.

"Blackness" as we have come to understand it today is a creation of 18th century Europe and the Enlightenment. It is a label that is currently inspiring so much ambivalence among people of African descent. During its tenure, blackness has become associated with slavery, illiteracy, dancing, physical strength, Jesus, good fucking, good cooking, violence, anger, laziness, courtesy, melodrama, comedy, music, ignorance, and wisdom all of which are practiced with the unique urgency of a people at the bottom of an opulent society.

During the last fin de siècle, occurring during the transition to the 21st century, a vogue began to spring up around the label, "post-blackness". Post-blackness is the attempt by some to infuse blackness with characteristics not commonly thought to be held by average black people. It's thesis holds that traditional blackness is too narrow or essentialist to describe new advances, views, and changes among black people. Yet, along with any progression, the underlying theme of blackness (i.e., how Africans and people of African descent deal with racism) has not disappeared. Far from being "after" or "later than" blackness, post-blackness is a misnomer for the effort to bring nuance to the current understanding of black, itself a very "black" thing to do (i.e., destroy stereotypes). We could venture to describe this process as the creation of a polyblackness, a hyperblackness, or simply a more detailed blackness. The distance and resolution implied by post-blackness is simply not consistent with reality today. -END-

Wilson, M.J. (2012). Pre-blackness, Blackness & Post-Blackness / 195,000 b.c. to Today. In B. H. Kasoro & K. D. Whittaker (Eds.), The Last Generation Of Black People. New York: The Liberator Magazine.

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David Banner

2015-10-05T14:33:00.001-04:00

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Stephanie Joy Tisdale {Brooklyn, New York}

Liberator Magazine: Hello. How are you?

David Banner: I’m better than I’ve ever been in my whole entire life.

Liberator Magazine: Walking With Gods (watch below) begins with references to Ancient Kemet, which we're introduced to through Akhet Heru, as well as the Akan symbol Gye Nyame. What aspects of these traditions are most valuable for Alex Light's journey?

David Banner: What we did was we took a synthesis...if you look at the makeup of his homeland and you look at some of the symbols...a lot of people looked at the Kemetic stuff that they saw. But its actually a synthesis of a lot of different parts of Africa. What we wanted to do was just sort of make a healthy synthesis so that people who were into those different areas would find some kinship with it.

One of the plans that I have--I don’t want to let too much out of the bag but--is once Walking with Gods becomes really big, I want to create a hyperlink to anything that you see on there, so that you can dive into the internet and figure out what that is and then could sync the symbols, and you know “what does this symbol mean?”

I hired some different friends of mine who are doctors at different colleges and institutions to just take different symbols and that aspect of maybe Egyptian culture or some of the things that came from Timbuktu and all these different places, all these different things that we put into it.

You know that kids, of whatever color, can figure out and really respect different aspects of African culture.

Liberator Magazine: You have Dr. Joy Degruy and Bill Duke among the special consultants for the series. I was curious to know what kind of advice maybe Bill Duke gave you as a director, and Dr. Degruy, with her work on the Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, just curious to know what their influence was on your work and how you got things done?

David Banner: Bill Duke and my mentor, Dr. David Moody, were real big reasons why I made Walking With Gods. Bill Duke challenged me, he said: “Get off your ass!” He said: “Make this in a month. Stop playing. If it’s something that you really want to do, do it! I’m gonna give you a month let me see what you gonna do!” Bill Duke was also the one who showed me how to chop the episodes up to keep people excited. Dr. Joy Degruy is one of my mentors as it pertains to the psychological effects of what has happened to Black people especially as it pertains to the TransAtlantic Slave trade, as it pertains to what we've gone through just in slavery period. She also was the one that helped me carve out like...every episode has an underlying meaning. Whether its Black Love, whether its Believing in Self. There’s these little small things that maybe people will see and maybe they won’t. Just about everything has a meaning and she was the one who helped me carve out those meanings.

Liberator Magazine: What do you hope for people to gain from Walking With Gods—we know they'll be many more episodes and much more to come about—but what do you want people to gain from these episodes?

David Banner: That's not really my place. Maybe what Walking With Gods is is much bigger than me. I’ve noticed this: that sometimes God makes us a conduit and if we just be still and maybe its bigger than us. Different things mean different things to different people. Actually, Erykah Badu taught me that.

She was like “Stop trying to explain everything. Maybe its bigger than you. Let people interpret, and let it be personal to them.” Only thing that I have to do is make sure its coming from a good place. Make sure that the information is correct. And it will stand on its own. So I’m just hoping that people watch it and that people enjoy it. Because the thing that I promised myself: when people see David Banner, I just want people to know that its the best that I can possibly do. That people are going to get something quality, that they’re going to get something that they can be proud of. That's the thing that makes me the most proud. Like some people get mad when somebody say stuff like “Aw man it was exciting!” when they put all this deep stuff in it. I just want it to be dope. And of course I have some things that I want people to get from it. But that ain’t your place, you know, you just present it to people and hopefully the God inside of them will move them in the direction because God may have something different for that individual when they see it. Just let it work.

You got to think about it, we are not great filters [laughs]. We have so many things—that’s one thing that Dr. Degruy teaches me is that—Black folks done went through so much, man we got a lot of anger so you know when the God inside of us speaking a lot of times when it comes to our filters its so distorted. So, just allow it to be. I’m just thankful to be able to...you know for God to put me in the..think about this...imagine how God is for God to give you the ability to think something and then people are calling me about it. This is something that I paid for with my money, or the money that was given through 2M1, and the money I donated—because I put a lot of money into it myself. But, to be able to think of something and for other groups of people to help you with a vision that you have and for it to be manifested and people like it. I had, I don’t remember the numbers, it was like 300 likes and only 1 dislike, just one--and you know how people are on the Internet. Not that that matters to me at all but that was a sign to me like wow…people are gravitating to this. I mean gangstas, I mean teachers, I mean Jackson State called me and they want to put it on T.V. Teachers are telling me that their kids are writing papers about it. I had one dude do a whole YouTube segment about it, you know...a little young guy...telling me that I was his new hero. And that’s a lot of pressure but for you to have a thought, and for that thought to influence or spark other people is amazing.

Liberator Magazine: Yeah it is. Wow that's amazing. You mentioned the 2M1 Movement. And you seem to have a strong desire to remain an independent artist. How have you been able to balance mainstream work as an actor and music artist, with independent projects like the 2M1 Movement and Walking With Gods? Especially with your new album, how are you able to like, you know, keep everything balanced?

David Banner: Just prayer, meditation, and taking one thing at a time. Mr. David Moody, my mentor, taught me that. He told me one of my problems is that I do too much all the time. Honestly, as much as it may seem, I’m working about 70% less than I used to and getting more accomplished because I’m doing one thing at a time, concentrating fully on one thing at a time. It’s funny I wanted to write about this--and I’m going to tell you before I write about it--one of the worst things that happened to America recently (I mean not as bad as something exploding but…) something that happened to the minds of Americans is in the 90's this big thing of multitasking. That’s the reason why people don’t have great memories, we’re trying to do too much. Just do one thing, do it great, finish it, and move on. Instead of tidbitting and never really completing one thing great. That was one of my problems as a rapper. When I would get close to being respected as a lyricist, then I would go produce [Lil] Wayne’s album or go and produce T.I.’s album. Then right there when I was close to being on that level of a super producer, then I’ll go and do a movie. Instead of staying in one place. Like Tupac did, Tupac became one of the best rappers ever. He really wanted to be an actor, then the acting came to him by him totally doing what he was supposed to do to do first.. I told her to give you 10 more minutes too.. I am enjoying this interview.

Liberator Magazine: Oh wow that's awesome, thank you so much! We really appreciate that. Speaking of Tupac, that's actually a great segue because on "Sex, Drugs and Video Games" you feature everyone from Big K.R.I.T. to A$AP Rocky, Ras Kass, and Lil Wayne. You've blended a wide spectrum of artists on the album, independently, which is pretty groundbreaking. What do you want people to hear when they're listening to the album? Was there a particular purpose around doing that, bringing all these people together? What was it about?

David Banner: None of that. I don’t plan on ever doing the old David Banner again. I’m metamorphosing right now, I’m turning into a different being...I don’t even know what that’s gonna be. I’m actually excited to see what I’m going to be as a rapper now. I always give the example of Andre 3000, when he made his big change, he just totally stopped doing that. I know as a fan, even though I’ve moved on, I still would love to hear an old Andre verse. So instead of keeping all that stuff together, I just wanted to give it all to the fans...like, here. Instead of just stop doing certain things altogether, I said I want to find a way to package it. And if you really listen to that album, it wasn't really the music, it was the interludes. Because, even some of those songs I wasn't really comfortable with putting out so what I did...I’ll give you an example. I did one interlude where I had a girl ask me “David Banner, would you let somebody call your mother or daughter a bitch?” I said, “No.” Then she said, “Then why would you call somebody else’s mother or daughter a ‘bitch’?” “Sex, Drugs, and Video Games” and then I go into a song talking about “bitches.” Sort of talking to myself. Where as I normally wouldn't put that album out...that song out, but that was sort of a segue into making people think like: “Damn, he just said that? Aww damn that’s dope! Why do we do that?”

And I think we don’t talk enough as Black people. Black people, we assume that everybody is like us and that they understand. But that, I wanted to put that in the people’s mind as they go into a certain song, you know? So, I just wanted to give all of that to the people, who are the old David Banner fans, so that they can never say...Well, shit is was free. I gave it to you, here it go.

And I don’t believe in free. I believe that’s how we have given our music and our talent away.

I want to tell you something really quick. I haven’t said this to anybody. I want to say it, but you’ll be the first person that I've said it to. I want to tell you something that America has done and nobody, to me, has peeped it out.

What type of music is selling the least right now (I mean the big genres of music), or has been hit the hardest by this so-called recession? Rap music and R &B music right? What do the most children want to do right now?

Liberator Magazine: Rap and R&B

David Banner: [Laughs] And then what they did was, right now...the Internet is what’s popping, you know...besides medicine and all the oil and all the super big things. So, we have convinced everybody to put everything online when Black people are not even in that sector. So whereas we had started getting our own record stores and all of this kind of stuff, as soon as we were close to controlling our images—what 2M1 is about—they now threw everything online, made everybody concentrate on being rappers, while they are into tech...and they’re out there in Silicon Valley getting real money and real control. And everybody wanting to be rappers and don’t even see that rapping not even selling no more. So you got all these kids spending all of this time and being distracted on trying to rap, when there is...it’s three rappers out here making money right now--I mean real money. The rest of them are not out here rapping. So I peeped it, I was like damn...that’s real chess. That’s real chess.

You don’t have kids focusing on computers, or building computers, or finance. Everybody is wanting to rap when they don’t see there is no money in it. I said it in one of my new songs, I said “People say I’m selfish, well rap records don’t sell.” Why would I start a record label, put all of my money and effort and time in a record label, when there is no return--so you don’t yield any return? But you call me selfish. No, that would actually be me paying attention.

Liberator Magazine: Wow, that's really insightful and its true, it's definitely something to think about. So you're basically saying that all of the visibility on the Internet is kind of driving young people to associate music with success? So that then the idea that you're going to become a rapper and become famous isn't realistic?

David Banner: It’s realistic but you have to do it yourself. See the thing is, the shift in the economy has been compensated by me going directly to the fans. So that 87% that the label used to take is now cut out. Like, I had a conversation with another rapper and he said “Man, how can you give your albums out for a dollar?” And then I turned around and tell him: “When you were on a major label how much were you getting?” He said “19 Cents.” I said, “I’m getting a $1!” [Laughs]

But people don’t put it on paper...my dad taught me that. My dad said, “If you notice what successful people do, they’re not emotional. They put it on paper...put it on a piece of paper and it’ll take all the emotion away.” You can still be it, just control it yourself.

You know, one of the saddest things to me as an entertainer is that America was based on taking advantage of certain races of people. And if you look at rap music, rap music has started echoing the sentiments that America has about Black people. I was watching Django and DiCaprio’s character was fighting all the Black people for entertainment, it reminded me so much of the rap game. Because that’s what rap really depicts.

If you selling dope..well who ya’ll really talking about selling dope to? You not selling no dope to white folk. So what you talking about is really selling dope to your own people. When you dissing folks, you ain't dissing no white rappers, you only dissing Black folks. So what we are is entertainment for other people to watch us mutilate and ridicule ourselves and our own culture, for other people’s entertainment--is really what it is. And that’s disheartening to me.

You pimping, but you only pimping one type of women. Like if you gonna pimp, pimp everybody. If you gonna sell dope, sell dope to everybody. But that’s one of the unspoken rules on the streets: don’t sell no dope to no white folk. So in the saying that, I would respect people more if you gonna murder, murder everybody. But usually, when we talk about murder, we only talking about murdering niggas and that’s disheartening.

Liberator Magazine: Yea it is. Wow, so with that being said--and even hearing about everything that you're saying--kind of leads me to ask about your spiritual journey. Going through your metamorphosis and the things you've talking about with that. Sometimes people look at that and say, "Oh you're changing, you're growing" but that's what we're all here on earth to do. I'm just curious to know what's been your inspiration for changing and growing and developing? If you could just elaborate further on how that's happened: the process.

David Banner: Pain and suffering, Sweety! [Laughs]

God has a way of making us suffer when we’re not in line. Think about everything naturally. I always tell people...one of my friends--he’s from England, he’s from Manchester--I go to him for advice a lot, he never gives me an answer. He always asks me, “How do you feel?” like “How do you feel?”

When you think about my metamorphosis as it pertains to rap, I would go out on stage and it didn't feel right any more. I think the stuff that I used to do, I needed to do it for that time. It was all purposeful. I used to get mad at myself now that I know what I know, like how could I do that. No, that’s what you were supposed to do. Because, if it were not for that, you wouldn't be here. You wouldn't be forced to grow. You understand? So, if it don’t feel right, it’s not right. If you not eating right, and you constantly not eating right what happens? You get a stomach ache, right?

Pain. So like, just certain things happened that were very painful.

And at one point in my life I think if I wouldn't have changed, I would've died: literally.

So baby, if you really want to know...it was times I couldn't sleep. So it was like...really God just sort of said “Okay, if you don’t want to listen”--because you know we hard-headed--”I’ll sit your ass over here in the corner” [Laughs]. I guess that’s what they mean by “your arms too short to box with God!” [Laughs]. “You keep swinging, I got something for your ass!” [Laughs].

The thing that I always want people to know is that the David Banner that everybody knew is still here. He’s still here, he’s still inside: I battle with him everyday. That’s one of the things that I hope when people see my new lifestyle, the way that I eat and that I train, and they think that the old David Banner is totally gone. He’s not, I fight with him all the time. And actually, he’s very important because at the end of the day if I need to—excuse me—put my foot in somebody’s ass...that’s still here. I call it a utility belt, God gave us a utility belt. You know like some women look at being raped or some of the things bad that have happened… and maybe that—I’m not saying if its right or wrong—but sometimes things happen to us so we can be the leader for other people so they won’t have to go through it. Or so they’ll know what to do when things happen. Like certain things happen that we think is bad, but sometimes it was meant to happen so you can shoulder the load for other people. And imagine you making that sacrifice so millions of other people won’t have to?

Imagine me going through the stuff that I went through, coming from Mississippi—and the pain that we went through as a race of people—so that I can explain that to the world so that maybe it won’t happen to other people. Yea, it was painful for me but maybe God put that on me for a reason. My uncle always tell me, I stopped saying “Why Me?” and say “Why not me?” But let me tell you one of my prayers though, I pray to God sometimes...I tell him—I been through some things, especially mentally, that I never want to go through—but my prayer to God is that I don’t go through it unless its necessary for me to grow as much as I grew from everyone of..all of the bad situations I've been through is when I've had my greatest levels of growth. If you sit down and really try to figure out what it’s for...I hope I’m answering your question.

Liberator Magazine: You are and its very powerful and very inspiring. It sounds so centered and grounded. And we truly appreciate...I know I appreciate what you're saying, it's very valuable.

David Banner: So listen, this is very important to me. At the end of the day, if people think what I’m doing is important, they have to go and contribute at Davidbanner.com. Because at the end of the day, if we don’t pay, it don’t matter. I was telling somebody, you know they were talking about the title, Walking With Gods. And I was telling them, its hard for Black people to comprehend who they really are and...to ask people to go from beggars to gods, I understand that jump because its hard for me every day. But we’re not beggars. You know what I’m saying? We have to stop expecting and thinking that life is free: ain't nothing in this life free. One of my best friends, her father always says “Free is much too expensive” because you always end up having to pay. All this free music, now all these people wanting to be rappers, you gonna have to pay for that free music because you won’t have a career. You wonder why your favorite artist is going off and doing movies and ain't making music no more. Hey, because of all that free music! You have to pay for everything, I don’t want nothing free! You always have to pay for it and the price is usually waaay too much.

Liberator Magazine: So we want people to go to DavidBanner.com, go to the website and make sure they show their support. Download the album and make sure they're watching Walking With Gods and all of that.

David Banner: I’ll give you an example. I had somebody tell me one time: “Why should I give you a $1 for this album?” I was like “Dude, you got Asap Rocky, Chris Brown on the album (two times), Bun B, Nipsey Hustle, Raheem Devaughn...and you mean to tell me that you don’t want to pay a $1?”

That’s what we've been reduced to...because we don’t see worth in ourselves. You know, that's what Walking With Gods is about. Akhet’s kryptonite is him not believing in himself, him not believing in his own power. Imagine if I would've listened to what people said, because I was from Mississippi, that I couldn't do it. Imagine if I listened to them instead of that voice that God put in me.

Liberator Magazine: Awesome, thank you so much. I really really appreciate it, we appreciate your time. We really appreciate it and wishing you the best with everything that you're doing. You're insight, your vision, it's been really inspiring and very powerful. Thank you so much for what you're doing and sharing your life. I think more than anything else that's what people will take away from this.

David Banner: Last thing that I want you to do for me is… tell people that the thing that means the most to me is...not just them retweeting it and them watching it themselves. If they really like the movement, and they like what I’m doing, I would ask them to tell one other person to promise that they’ll watch it. And then ask them to ask somebody else to watch it. That’s how Walking With Gods has grown, we had 20,000 views in less than a week. And I purposefully didn't do any major PR because I want the people who supported it to feel like its something. Because think about it: when something is pressed on you from a massive perspective, then you just look at it and then throw it away because you feel like everybody is seeing it, so it ain't that important. Imagine those things that you find, imagine those treasures. I even set it up where people couldn't view it on their phones, on purpose. I want people to fight for it. I mean, I may lose a lot of people from doing that but the people that do go on that journey...once they find it, then they’re with you forever. We’re creating a Star Wars, something that’s going to be as great or greater because people have gone through that journey. People will stand outside for that journey that you take them on. Just ask people to go on this journey. You know, I always ask people—they ask me to follow them on twitter—and I always answer them “I don’t know where you taking me...I don’t know if I want to follow your ass!” [Laughs]

Oh boy! I appreciate you, okay?

Liberator Magazine: Thank you so much. I appreciate you as well. Thank you! -END-

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We've Brought In the New Year With a Gunshot / "We replaced a vigor for justice with an appetite for the mundane and barbaric"

2015-10-05T14:32:00.001-04:00

lib.mg exclusive feature
Michael J. Wilson {Brooklyn, New York}

{purchase this artwork on custom clothing}

We’ve brought in the new year with a gunshot; at the dawn of the last year of our digital decade, we’ve managed to bear witness to a cyber execution. It was only a matter of time before our blood-thirst synthesized itself with our technological obsessions and provided us with popular hyperlinks to death — you can even add them to your favorites.

We will remember the textbook and documentary photographs from our high school days showing a sea of white Southerners gathered beneath the charred remnants of a dangling black corpse. Proud white fathers with their families clutched beside them, all of them goggling at the flaked and chipping carcass with looks of satisfaction. In some of the pictures, the onlookers even wore wide grins, their teeth beaming with giddiness. Some of us will even recall the subtle, yet sudden, thrill we felt when these images flashed before us, how — stopping just short of necrophilia — our curious eyes poured over the contorted faces and snapped limbs filling us with a repulsive awe of those historical murders.

But finally, the black-and-whiteness of the images reminded us of their antiquity; we shook our heads out of that daze and resettled on the fact that we were now living in the Information Age and that the representation of such atrocities were relegated to a quickly fading reservoir of memories (of course, one demanding our respect) that belonged to some distant past replete with Jim Crow and black people too humble or fearful to retaliate to such butcher.

Through several tempestuous decades, our forefathers had managed to expose those Southern horrors and force the nation to civilize itself. Yes, those forefathers endured the fire hose and the German Shepherd, the hair-full-of-ketchup and the rock pelting, the numerous court cases and assassinations — endured them all with the most gallant embrace of humanity; at once steadfast and determined and shrouded by unconditional love for all mankind. In every noteworthy instance they were able to claim the moral high ground and manipulate the American pathology by highlighting the nation’s hypocrisies and inconsistencies.

Soon the country emerged beleaguered from the Civil Rights Movement and stumbled awkwardly toward the close of the 20th century. In what seemed to be the nation’s final racist palpitation, crack was blown into the ghetto streets, leaving in its wake a war-torn urban landscape infested with zombies. Not to be undone by the disaster, we managed to channel our angst into music, weather the remaining crack storm and endure long enough to eventually profit from our struggles. And our profiteering was complemented by our arrival on the corporate American stage. What appeared to be the infiltration of America’s cushiest domains was taking place all over the country; the multiplication of black professionals in law, health, government and entertainment.

We had, for years, been relegated to the elevators and security posts ... to bowing quietly over mops, push brooms, dirty dishes and shoeshine rags only to have finally forced the nation to acknowledge and uphold equal opportunity making way for the tide of black know-how and sophistication that would simultaneously swell the chests of the Civil Rights generation as well as bring into question those traditional definitions and explanations for race and racism. If the Rodney King beating was the last authentic and major hiccup of American racism, then Hurricane Katrina could be explained merely as a horrible mis-communication on one hand, and a blatant disregard for the warnings of authorities on the other.

All the same, the nation was committed to uniting itself against larger conflicts abroad, conflicts that threatened our stability and sovereignty and Katrina could not be allowed to take precedence over that predicament for too long. We bided our time, anxious for election season and the prospect of a changing of the guard. To our sweet and delicious surprise, equal opportunity presented us with its grandest manifestation -- a feasible, no, extraordinary black presidential candidate. Now the time had come for us to see that Civil Rights-Era dream materialize in a manner that had previously seemed so distant and unimaginable.

The opportunity had arrived for the nation to finally prove, in the most quantifiable manner possible, that it had shucked its barbaric racial reservations aside and that it was now able to judge men on quality alone. And what a sweet release, what a sweet political orgasm it was that erupted on the November streets as we found ourselves leaping over the brink of newness and ... change. Those old black-and-white lynchings had finally given way to black cool and sophistication — made all the more enticing because it could be observed in HD. The nation was suddenly galvanized, the world became like one swooning mass of humanity and the galaxy itself seemed to pulsate in cosmic celebration of this turning of the tide. All of this before the closing of the first decade of the new millennium!

And then a bullet zipped out of the chamber and pierced the lung of Oscar Grant.

The initial response to such an event may indeed be one of indignation. That constituency of black Americans who remained somewhat hesitant to buy into the mantra of progress and ... change ... may breathe an awkward sigh of relief at having their paranoia justified. Black president notwithstanding, the nation, in fact, has not managed to shake its racist past. It has merely managed to make that past more complex, more obscure and intangible. Like some Darwinian nightmare, color prejudice and hate do not really fade; they adapt and grow stronger, more sophisticated and palatable. But while a post-racial America can enter into a discourse on Hurricane Katrina without placing race at the center of the argument or stroke at its own ego by electing a black president, its logic seems to crumble at the instant a three-and-a-half minute video clip of an outright murder turns up in cyberspace.

All the evidence is there: the black male pressed to the ground in handcuffs, the sentinel-like white officers lording over him and the other young men, the train car full of confused and incensed eye-witnesses, that sudden pop, the ominous reaction of the witnesses and the cautious scramble of the cops afterward. There you have it, Jim Crow-style even. Racism. See? Pass it on. Share it with your friends; post it to your blog, on your favorite message board. Get the word out: America Still Racist. 437,953 views. The footage is passed on so quickly and so widely that soon it transcends its initial role of mere evidence of a racist act and becomes a sort of American fetish, an object of homicidal voyeurism -- and we’re all in on it.

In our rush to highlight the prevalence of racism in the society, we have replaced a vigor for justice with an appetite for the mundane and barbaric. In our digital age, it is becoming more fulfilling to merely point out -- with a great deal of glee -- those acts of racism that might have fueled an effective response only two generations ago. The former ideal of snuffing out racism is being overshadowed by the overall acceptance of racism as an entertaining and everyday feature of American life. One of the by-products of the new video technologies is their uncanny ability to rapidly introduce fads and then dismiss them because of the sheer speed at which videos are uploaded and viewed. Before we have time to respond to an internet sensation such as Oscar Grant’s killing, it is already time for us to quickly discuss Beyonce’s feelings about the President, or footage of a plane crashing into the Hudson.

Many of us have stated that the recent election marks a sort of fulfillment of Dr. King’s Dream speech, specifically the line where King states, “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

It seems that our post-millennial form of integration has allowed for a degree of closer contact and communication and so-called sharing, but at a desk of savagery. At a table where breaking bread comes in the form of vying for the most spectacular, yet somehow not surprising, discrepancies of early 21st century life. We may soon find that this newfound brotherhood provides the sons and daughters of former slaves and slave owners to join hands and smile at the dangling carcass before growing bored and seeking out our next digital fix — with so much speed.

{The Liberator Magazine 8.1 #23, 2009}
artwork by Kevin O'Brien

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Angela Davis & Toni Morrison / How do we become whole ... after traumas that threaten to splinter our souls?: On literacy, libraries, & liberation

2015-10-05T13:45:00.000-04:00

“Write it down, girl. Tell everyone how much it hurts. Sharing will make it easier to bear.”
-Terri L. Jewell

How do we become whole -- again, or perhaps for the first time -- after experiencing traumas that threaten to splinter our souls? How do we collect the shards of our broken selves that have been flung far and wide by the impact of life’s blows? How do we process individual and collective pains that have ripped apart our cores? Where do we find wellness, and to whom, or to what, do we turn when relief seems illusory?

The road to recovery is meandering. It is even more twisted for those among us who are incarcerated, and who, often times, have landed behind bars because of behaviors triggered by our deep wounds and ugly scars. How, then, do the jailed build a sense of self within a structure that is designed to systematically demolish the remnants of dignity? This question provided the framework for a transformative workshop that I attended about a year ago, one of seemingly hundreds featured at the five-day US Social Forum in Detroit, MI. Organized by the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), the event, “Community, Art and Transformative Justice: Healing and Resistance with Women and Transgender Prisoners,” served as a opportunity for former prisoners to communicate with the broader public about their struggle to attain mental and emotional health while confined, both literally and figuratively. CCWP staffers distributed the quarterly publication, The Fire Inside, featuring the art and writings of incarcerated women. The stories, sketches, and paintings contained in the magazine ran the gamut from heart-wrenching to heart-warming. I realized, as I absorbed the words and images shared, just how narrow the bottomless pit between sanity and madness is, how dependent on each other we are -- and need to be -- in order to shed the avoirdupois that threatens to submerge us in that finite space, and how reading and writing are floatation devices, imbued with the power to prevent us from drowning in that abyss.

The connective tissue here is the idea that each of us is, in varying degrees, caged by the wreckage of our past, and sometimes, our present. Literacy skills serve as invaluable tools as we clear away the rubble in order to make room for a future peppered with the possibility of rebirth. Angela Davis and Toni Morrison explore this notion in a conversation that is essentially a celebration of reading and writing. The dialogue, excerpted below, is one that occurs between old friends -- they bonded when Morrison edited Davis’ autobiography, which was published in 1974 -- therefore, it lumbers along, sometimes taking scenic detours away from the main point. This fact, I suppose, is forgivable, given the heft of both the speakers and the content. Stick with the duo and you will find yourself glowing in the warmth generated by the sharing of ideas between intellectual allies, and privy to a fascinating exploration of literacy as a match capable of igniting recovery and redemption, and sparking resistance.

LIVE from the NYPL: Angela Davis and Toni Morrison: Literacy, Libraries, and Liberation

Toni Morrison: We’re just talking, ooh.

Angela Davis: We’re talking about [Frederick] Douglass, libraries --

Toni Morrison: Literacy --

Angela Davis: Literacy and liberation.

Toni Morrison: Yes, absolutely. Let me start with literacy. Because I have this document here which I want, you know, other people to know about it. We’ll read it. I’m interested, obviously, in literacy. I am impressed with what I’ve only recently discovered, which was that this country is unique in the world in terms of the distribution of libraries throughout the country. You cannot go in rural areas in Europe or in Africa or in Asia, rural areas and find libraries the way you can here, every little town, not to speak of the huge university libraries that just jump up out of nowhere in Indiana, or someplace. In Pennsylvania you go for a hundred miles and there it is, you know, this enormous university, with more books actually than Cambridge or the libraries in Rome, so it’s really an extraordinary thing.

The other thing is about literacy which I’m sort of interested in which is on one hand the power of reading and of course understanding the meaning of what one reads and what I like to think of as visual literacy, visual literacy, which in addition to print or maybe without print, what do people who are literally illiterate do to negotiate around the world, minus people who they depend on? And I don’t mean just uneducated people, I mean people like myself, say, in Beijing, and I don’t read the language, I don’t understand it. How do you negotiate and what are the visual signs that you need to travel? What are the colors, the shapes, the sounds, smells, all the other senses, and it makes for -- if you have that plus the ability to read -- you have this third dimension, an artist’s true dimension of how to read your world as well as how to read texts, and I wanted to begin, because I wanted to describe -- I don’t know -- the explosive, the perception of reading, particularly certain kinds of novels, as not just explosive in a dangerous sense, but explosive in a way that could be lethal.

And my documentation for this, Angela. Well, what it is it was sent to me by an editor from Knopf. The title is the “Publication Denial Notification.” The title of the publication is Paradise by me. “The above publication has been reviewed and denied in accordance with section 3.9 of the TDC rules and regulations for the reasons checked below.” Now, there are five reasons why a book would be banned from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The third one…that’s the one that Paradise is accused of. “Publication contains material that a reasonable person would construe as written solely for the purpose of communicating information designed to achieve a breakdown.” Not just your average breakdown, but a breakdown of prisons through inmate disruption, such as strikes or riots. This is February 20, right after my birthday, 1998. I was amused to get this but I was also thrilled. It seemed like an extraordinary compliment that Paradise could actually blow up into a riot in a prison. So I thought that in addition to my inquiry about expanding literacy to visual literacy as well as print I wanted to make some connection between prisons, their organization, their prohibition, and what they understand to be lethal or dangerous, like reading, like literacy, like understanding.

Angela Davis: I actually wanted to begin on that theme by talking a bit about the inaccessibility of libraries, and I’m thinking about my own childhood, when I saw this incredible building in Birmingham, Alabama, made out of Indiana limestone. It was the Birmingham Public Library, but of course it was only for white peoples. The one black library that existed was run-down, very few books, and I tell this story because I first entered the doors of this library in 1959, and I can remember how it felt to actually walk into a real library, because although I had used the library in Birmingham, it was very lacking in resources. It was broken down. Finally they built a new one.

Toni Morrison: Years later.

Angela Davis: Yeah, many, many years later. So I think that as we talk about the democratic impulse of libraries and the accessibility of libraries it’s also important to talk about those places where books have a hard time penetrating. And your example of the Texas State Correctional System is one. Just before the event, I had an opportunity to look at some of the items from the archival collections here, and I saw -- I saw a wonderful collection of a periodical that was actually published by prisoners at Rikers Island from I think 1939 to 1940-something, and I was thinking about, you know, what was required in order to be able to do that. This is, for those of you who don’t remember, a period when we didn’t have Xeroxing or, I looked at it and I said, “This was mimeographed,” I think -- is that the word, mimeograph? And the prisoners who put this together, and the books that they had to read in order to put this literary publication together was quite astounding, so I really like to thank the librarians for allowing me to see these documents.

I was in jail in New York -- I don’t know, did you mention that I was in jail? Some people don’t know. And one of the first places I went, I was able to go, in the jail was the library, and I didn’t see very many interesting books there, all right? I mean, I had just finished my studies in philosophy, and I went to the library expecting something very different, so what I did was I had people send books to me when I was there, and I wanted to share those books with all of the other women, there was something like a thousand women there. I was not allowed to do that.

Toni Morrison: You could receive the books.

Angela Davis: I could receive the books and I could read the books myself. It was okay for me read them, but don’t share them. And one of them was George Jackson’s book, Soledad Brothers, that was not allowed at all, although we did -- you know, one of the things I learned when I was in jail there was how to secrete certain kinds of things, so we were able to -- so we had these clandestine reading groups, and it kind of reminded me of Frederick Douglass and Frederick Douglass’s effort to get an education, to learn how to read, and his idea that education really was liberation.

Toni Morrison: Absolutely. That scene, I’m sure people who have read the autobiography, of the master saying, “don’t teach him,” and the mistress wanting to, but being afraid to, but he uses an interesting phrase of describing her, which was “irresponsible power,” and I thought that’s, it’s just not having the power, it’s the irresponsibility of how you manage it. And his hunger was overwhelming, cause he knew, as we all know, that that was freedom, and the people who did not want blacks to read knew that. I mean, that’s why, you know. If it had been simple fairy stories, it would have been quite different. Not even that, there is power, if you can’t read in a place like that they can teach you and beat you and the other route is extraordinary. The things people suffered in order to read.

Angela Davis: I was thinking about you know Frederick Douglass’s another passage in the narrative where he kept hearing this word abolition, and he didn’t know what it meant, and he heard about the abolitionists, but he had no idea what it meant and he said that at some point he realized that it was connected to something that he really oughtta be interested in. And then eventually -- he describes this painstaking process of learning, you know, learning how to write -- learning how to read and learning how to write by looking at the markings that were placed on the boards to be used to build ships, so one would say something is forward, starboard, “f,” “s,” and then he learned those letters, “f,” “s,” as a result.

Toni Morrison: Right, it’s amazing.

Angela Davis: And then of course he talks about bribing the white boys to teach him how to read and write. He says at one point he dares a white boy who was around to prove that he could write better than Frederick Douglass himself could. Now, Frederick Douglass really didn’t know how to write that much, so the white boy could write a lot more, so in the process he learns what the white boy was writing. So but the point that I was making about hearing this word and knowing there was something about this word that was so important, but he had no idea what it meant.

Toni Morrison: But he was attracted to it. He knew it was important.

Angela Davis: Abolition. Abolitionists.

Toni Morrison: Sounds like -- sounds important.

Angela Davis: And then of course he becomes the most powerful abolitionist of the era. But that kind of curiosity that really is only possible through a process of education. You know, where, which is not to say that people who don’t know how to read and write don’t have that curiosity but learning how to read and write opens up a whole new universe, opens up a whole new dimension, and this is why these Texas people did not want the prisoners to read. Yes, exactly.

And then you know when you consider that there are now 2.5 million people behind bars, and what can they really do, what can they do that’s significant? You know, reading and writing really allows for the possibility of inhabiting a very different world.

Toni Morrison: But the control of those 2.5 million people -- I don’t know about all -- but it’s such a profit-making thing now. I mean, you have whole cities, I know in Upstate New York, that are living off the benefits of a brand-new prison, employment of the guards, the cooks, you know, all the paraphernalia that goes with imprisonment. I don’t know how they -- Oh, I read about somebody in one of those prisons in Texas, privately owned prisons where the prisoners get out and owe money.

Angela Davis: When the prisoners get out they get no --

Toni Morrison: They owe.

Angela Davis: They owe money, yeah, because they have to pay for their own room and board.

Toni Morrison: Right. They’re in college.

Angela Davis: Yeah, it’s just like the students, right?

Toni Morrison: Room and board, you get out and have this bill, if your family can’t pay, not only have you paid in time for whatever, and then of course the kinds of laws that are, you know, heavily weighted in certain communities for minor offenses and so on, not to speak of. But I was interested in your book because I’m not sure I understand fully that separation -- well, that’s not, well, the implication is that there’s a difference, well, there is a difference between vengeance and justice. But justice itself has some unpleasant consequences. We have to assume that if we want justice for some bad activity by a bad person we want punishment, we want restraint, we don’t want rehabilitation, and that assumes that there is something called “the other,” there is a stranger, that your neighbor or the criminal, the so-called criminal, is some other thing, is an other.

Now, I was thinking along those lines when I was trying to figure out another area that is of great interest to me and has always been, but I have never had the patience or maybe the intelligence or maybe the research to kind of follow it through, which is what the impact of torture, enslavement, and violence has on the birth rate. Therapists don’t seem to be terribly interested in that, but when I mention the other possibility, it seems to me that when you destroy somebody through vengeance and/or severe forms of justice that the real object of the pain really is the self.

So I’m thinking about these slave owners. I’m thinking about say, women in slave quarters, who were pregnant, lying on the ground, and they’d make a hole for her stomach, or any other, you know, sort of savage response that even the one that Frederick Douglass speaks of. It’s very clear in his case when he finally confronts that Covey. Who is Covey fighting? He’s destroying something that is in himself. It’s not that that person is animal or soulless or inferior. If you’re strong enough, you know, it’s the fragile personality, the fragile personality, not the strong one, but the fragile, almost erasable personality that can do that. Because there’s already the self-contempt and the self-loathing, and it’s in that area that I, well -- well, I couldn’t say I’m working -- but I’m just looking at these various forms, it’s so easy -- racism obviously is the easiest thing you can do. It’s so easy to block off those so-called criminals, and they’re away from us, they’re not with us. We don’t even have to be tolerant, because they’re over there, but if they’re us. If we’re doing that in order to corral a certain kind of behavior whether it’s scaled as high or low in order to redeem something in ourselves, that’s a whole different operation, entirely different.

Angela Davis: So do we want to take any questions from the audience? A few? Okay,

Question: If we’re talking about prisons and talking about how inhuman it is and how we are being deprived of so many brilliant minds that are in prison that should be helping to lead the country, can we talk about Mumia and all the political prisoners that are in prison who should be amongst us, please?

Angela Davis: Well, first, I would say that, you know, speaking of literacy and libraries and liberation, Mumia Abu-Jamal has made such an amazing contribution to all three of those categories. This is something that we have to -- we have to save Mumia’s life. We have to save Mumia’s life and it’s also about the relationship between learning and freedom. It’s about the uses to which we put our literacy and because of the fact that there’s been this mobilization against Mumia by law enforcement all over the country it has not been possible to build the kind of campaign that we see in other parts of the world. As a matter of fact, Mumia is an honorary citizen of Paris and there are streets named after him all over Europe. In Germany everyone knows his name. That’s a good question, what can we do? And also I think we have to do the work that needs to be done to build movements, that is to use all of your contacts to encourage people to think about this case, tell people about Mumia. If you have kids who are in school ask the teachers to talk to the children about the meaning of living in a so-called democratic society and using capital punishment as a routine mode of addressing a whole range of issues. This is the only industrialized democracy in the entire world that puts people to death in this way, and Mumia more than anyone has been the face of the campaign to expand democracy in this country, to abolish capital punishment and the death penalty.

Question: I’d like to ask you if you think which is worse: being internally imprisoned or being imprisoned by society? And do you think it is possible to be internally free while being imprisoned by society? I’m referring to slavery and just being in prisons recently.

Toni Morrison: You’re really asking about freedom, internal, external. I have a very small short answer about internal freedom. I’m from Ohio, near Lake Erie, it is a working-class town that had steel mills, shipyards, and so on, so a lot of people came there, African Americans from the South and Mexicans, and Europeans and so on, I mean, a real diverse, as they say in the world, community. The only common thread we had was poverty. But, again we were citizens.

You know, the Polish lady next door would bring us those little cabbage things with meat in them, you know, if we didn’t have any, and if we had something, we’d bring her and everyone had gardens. I’m not trying to make it sound like it was thrilling, because but although we were too young to know, we were miserable. So at any rate, my experiences about race are very different from many other black people. One is because I grew up in a mixed neighborhood. Didn’t mean people didn’t call me name, but you know, they were calling each other names, so what? I remember coming home and some little boy called me a wicked name, he said “You Ethiopian, you.” I said, “Ma, what’s an Ethiopian?” and she said, “Well, Ethiopia’s a country in Africa and this and that and I think the original human beings were born there or something and we all came,” so I thought, “What is he talking about?”

So, but, here’s the thing. There were little minor things like that and sometimes from adults, but I never felt, and this is curious, and I think I know why, but I never felt it the way it was meant, and I think the reason is because I always thought those people were deficient in some way. Always, even as a little, I thought they were deficient, like they had a big sort of racial moment when I was working for some white family just before I got my job as a page, I was working after school just doing housework for two dollars a week, one of which went to my mother and the other I could keep but she had some complicated -- for me, complicated equipment like vacuum cleaners, I never saw one, and a stove that had other things, and I didn’t know how to work it, so she would curse me out, “what’s the matter with you?” Told my mother, “I gotta quit, she’s too mean,” and my mother said, “Quit,” I only get that one dollar, right, so I told my father, and he said -- “I said, Daddy, she’s so mean,” and he said, “Go to work, get your money, and come on home, you don’t live there.” So I didn’t have an employment problem since. It was not -- my life was not there and also I didn’t have to disdain or be afraid of or neglect any person who had an advantage, a skin advantage, over me, whoever they were. I never felt that.

And when I wrote the first book I wrote, The Bluest Eye, I really wanted to know why that girl felt so bad, a real-life girl who said she wanted blue eyes. We were talking about whether God exists, I, of course, was persuaded that he did and she was persuaded that he did not, and her proof was that she had prayed for blue eyes for two years, and she didn’t get them, so obviously he wasn’t up there. But when I looked at her and thought about how awful she would look if she got them, and then I thought the second thing was how beautiful she was at that moment, you know, she was just incredible -- but I didn’t even know whether she was beautiful or not until I thought I about what she might think and then the third thing of course is why does she want that, you know, what makes her think that’s an improvement, and that kind of self-loathing which is real when you don’t have any support, made me think of that as a real subject for a book, not some “oh victim,” but really how it works. How you can -- but I lost your question.

Angela Davis: It was about freedom, too.

Toni Morrison: So that internal thing. I had trouble when I first went, traveled south. Not with white people, yeah, maybe, but my inability to perceive how Southern blacks who were, you know, their whole lives were oppressed, like not feeling comfortable, not being able to go into the library, I mean just anything like that, not knowing, you know, is this place safe or is that place safe, or knowing where the safe places are, and what that might do. How to escape from that, how does one internalize that, or does one, you see, and if you do, you know, how do you get rid of it? So all of those questions, but I never -- But I always thought that those people whether they were adults or children, like he called me Ethiopian, that was, like, so stupid. He had sort of complimented me in a way, that I could not, you know, feel that degradation I was supposed to feel or the self-loathing, and I always felt that inside, which I suppose is called arrogance, uppity, but I think it was the way in which my family responded to it. They were both from the South, Deep South, Alabama and Georgia, but they instilled in us some other thing.

Angela Davis: And it’s actually on a different kind of register about freedom, internal freedom, external freedom, what do we mean by freedom, and we’ve been talking about Frederick Douglass, and freedom had a certain historical meaning then. It was about abolishing slavery, and as I thought about this new edition of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I thought it would be important to point out that in a sense as incredible and as brilliant as Frederick Douglass was, his imagination of freedom was historically constricted so that in a lot of ways it was about manhood. And that fight with Covey proves his manhood, and in the process it provides a path towards freedom, and so the question is, well, what about women, and what about little girls, how could they imagine freedom?

And so I want to say, I want to say this in response to one of the earlier questions that I didn’t get to answer about homophobia and the suicides of young gay people today and it’s about how we think about freedom and the historical -- the deeply historical character of our own imaginings of what it means to be free and what did it mean to be free in Frederick Douglass’s time? What did it mean to struggle for freedom during the civil rights era? You know, what does it mean to expand our notion of freedom today? We’ve talked a lot about immigrants, you know, Toni, you were talking about the wall in Mexico, you talked about Palestinians, so how do we bring Palestinian freedom into our frame, how do we bring the freedom of immigrants into the way we imagine freedom today? How do we think about transgendered people? How do we think about gays, lesbians, bisexuals, within the frame of freedom? And what does that tell us about the extent to which our own framework of freedom is quite restricted? So I ask myself sometimes a hundred years from now how are people going to be talking about the struggle for freedom? Because I don’t think we’re ever going to get there. I don’t think we’re ever going to reach a point where “we are free, right, we can rest, we can stop now. We’ve won.” And so it seems that in the very process of struggling for freedom, of reflecting on freedom, of writing about freedom, we constantly challenge the framework within which we develop that imaginary of freedom, so --

Toni Morrison: I think it is. It’s powerfully imaginative. In a certain period it’s this, in another period, it’s something else. I think of freedom as -- a major part of it for me is knowledge, maybe wisdom if you get there, but certainly knowledge, and then I’m reminded that the first sin, Genesis, the sin, is knowledge. The acquisition of knowledge. That’s why they get thrown out of that little kindergarten they were in, that little playpen, nah nah nah, you know something, and the literal words at least in one of the translations, the King James, it’s “they may become wise,” so stop that. They knew and in many other religious forms, that’s why faith and belief are so important, and not knowledge, faith, belief, just instant, which is, you know, I’m not complaining, I’m just suggesting that there’s something so powerful, so attractive, so liberating about what we call science, knowledge, that you can’t have any, which is the same sort of thing that we were talking about with this document from the Texas Corrections Bureau and what Angela is talking about when she talks about the necessity of reading, literacy of all kinds under constrained circumstances. And what Frederick Douglass did, having an intellect like Mumia in prison, all of this works into the same thing. The big horror, they have led us to believe, is knowledge, because that will set you free. (source/full text)

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Nijla Mu'min's "Deluge" / Magical Realism, post-BP oil spill New Orleans, and Black Mermaids

2015-10-05T13:35:00.000-04:00

Nijla Baseema Mu’min is a writer and filmmaker from the San Francisco Bay Area. A 2007 graduate of UC Berkeley, she is now pursuing a dual MFA degree in Film Directing and Writing at Calarts. I've been following Nijla’s work from quite some time, more specifically her recent work -- from her short film Two Bodies, which has screened at festivals across the country, including the 20th Annual Pan African Film Festival, the Fusion: LA LGBT People of Color Film Festival to her essay which is included in the The New York Times-featured book, Love InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women. Her newest film Deluge involves Drexciyan-like underwater worlds and archetypes. As Nijla describes:

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Deluge is a short film that explores African American’s relationships to water, informed by such traumas as The Middle Passage, the BP Oil spill, and Hurricane Katrina, through the lens of main character Tiana, and her introduction to an aquatic underworld. After witnessing the mass drowning of her friends and struggling with the decision not to jump in, 14-year old Tiana must decide if she will join the order of black mermaids that protect the oil-drenched waters of Lake Pontchartrain where her friends rest. This film is inspired by the 2010 mass drowning of six black teens in a Shreveport, Louisiana sinkhole. None of them could swim. The film blends coming of age drama, magical realism, and psychological suspense to explore traumatic memory in a post- BP oil spill New Orleans.
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A crowd-sourced fundraising effort currently underway ends Thursday, June 14. We reached out to Nijla to learn more about the inspiration behind Deluge.

LM: The premise of Deluge delicately integrates themes such as environmental racism, spiritual relationships with water, Yoruba mythology, and the vulgarities of slavery. When sitting down to write this film, what did your research process look like? And I know you traveled to New Orleans for location scouting. How did being in that space help you develop this story?

Since I was young, I’ve been fascinated with black history and people. My artistic practice is largely informed by continued research and exploration. I like to think this film is an extension of life passions that took root then. This film began as a poem I wrote in the wake of the BP Oil Spill. I was overcome with thoughts of water lineage and oil trauma, and what that meant for an order of black mermaids who I imagined as guardians of the ocean since the Middle Passage. Around this same time, I read M. Nourbese Philip’s book, Zong!, a poetic recapturing of the court decision regarding the Zong Slave ship where a captain decided to murder 150 Africans by drowning in order to collect insurance money. I also read Salt Water Slavery by Stephanie Smallwood, and was struck by a chapter detailing the many ways that captured Africans died on slave ships. There was a sense of agency in some of these deaths, be it throwing one’s self overboard, or the example of a man who purposely laid out on the top layer of a boat while it rained, and died there. And there were also murders- human beings used as bait for sharks and thrown into the water against their will, only to drown.

When I transitioned from the poem into the screenplay, the story was a complete underwater narrative, complete with black mermaids and ancestral sea cemeteries. As I began to think of the project as a potential thesis film, I knew I wouldn’t be able to capture the full extent of that world in the time and budget I had as a graduate student. I had to figure out how to marry the above-ground story with the aquatic presence of the original idea.

It may sound crazy, but the present structure for the film came to me in a dream. The dream revealed that there was a way to merge the story of the drowning and the black mermaids in a way that conveyed the depth and texture of both, and within a thesis film framework.

Filmmaker Haile Gerima always talks of one’s dreams being the language of cinema. In this case, it was. I woke up, went to my laptop, and wrote the treatment for what would become Deluge.

During my trip location scouting, I was further convinced that this film couldn’t come alive in any other location than Louisiana, and New Orleans specifically. This is a landmass that is so very dependent and linked to water, with areas below sea level. There’s water and moisture all around, the energy is wet, and I felt it all wash over me while there. The Gulf is also an important anchor for the mermaids in the film.

I also wanted to play with themes of oil and its presence in the lives of people- to fry food, to use in our hair, to fix cars, to wage wars. Oil takes on so many meanings and I wanted to explore subtle associations between oil, toxins, teen sexuality, and water. Water as a metaphor for youth and life and, what happens when relationships to water are compromised by oil, industrial residue, and pollution.

LM: This film was inspired by the mass drowning of six black teens in a Shreveport, Louisiana sinkhole. I vividly remember this story as it was linked to my fears of being unable to swim. I remember the story quickly disappearing from the public discourse. Can you talk a bit more why this story needs further exploration and deconstruction?

When I heard about the story of these teens, I kept thinking about what their day was like leading up to the drowning; what they ate for breakfast, what their parents told them that morning, what their conversations were on the way to the Red River. I wondered if they had crushes and if they’d spoken with them that day. I also thought about the surviving teen and how he’d navigate life after such trauma. What would be his relationship to water in the aftermath of this? How would it inform their life? These are all questions and thoughts that overwhelmed me. They wouldn’t let go of me. In that space, I began to build scenes, moments, and characters that would become part of the film.

I don’t consider myself to be the authority of black people’s relationships with water, or even the example of water literacy. I actually taught myself to swim as a kid and have encountered bouts of insecurities about my own competence as a swimmer. This film isn’t a PSA on learning to swim or even an advisory of what happens if you don’t. In so many ways, Deluge is my own personal investigation of water.

I believe the most powerful films start as personal dialogues between a filmmaker and their subject, and then expand into something larger and layered. That is my aim with Deluge.

There are no easy answers or solutions to statistics that black children are three times more likely to drown than white children. There have been, and there are systemic barriers to water access and training. There are toxins and pollutants in many natural bodies of water around urban neighborhoods and communities. There is fear of water, there are insecurities around our hair getting “messed up” after we swim. There is water that isn’t safe to drink or shower in. There was a city that went underwater before the government cared to respond.

Some pools were doused with bleach and acid when black people tried to swim in them. There are so many multi-layered conversations to be had around black Americans and water, and how we can start to collectively reclaim and embrace water. The Shreveport drowning initiated my own conversation with these issues, and I’m hoping that Deluge continues it.

LM: You wrote that the film blends elements from a poem you wrote about black mermaids born from the souls of Africans who jumped, or were thrown overboard slave ships during the Middle Passage. Can you share an excerpt of that poem with us? I am curious about this notion of the Black mermaid and how it reminds me of the story of the flying Igbo.

Yes, I’ve included two stanzas of the poem below. The full, signed, framed poem is available to contributors who donate $25 or more to our Indiegogo campaign.

We sing saline
prayers
with locs of sea weed
and kiss the bones of babies
once dropped
kiss the bones of black men
and women who jumped overboard,
screaming us into the waters-
sea creatures,
surviving unlike them

LM: I glanced at your tumblr, aptly titled “Water Notes” and noticed a few images -- particularly an animated gif of THEESatisfaction's video for "QueenS" tagged as "mermaids". What is a Black mermaid?

A large part of Deluge is the creation of the black mermaid ethos. I think there’s a common, accepted Western conception of mermaids that positions them as mostly sexual creatures that lure people, (mostly men) into questionable circumstances. In my imagining of the black mermaids, I referred to Yoruba mythology, which shifts that western idea of sea beings into a more holistic, universal existence. Black mermaids emerge here as descendants of enslaved Africans and specific types of fish- bettafish, neon tetra, just to name a few. They possess a command of their bodies and some of them are sensual, but not for the sole purpose of male consumption.

I began a surrealist text/companion piece that details the origins of the black mermaids and their present endangerment in the midst of the Oil spill. That text, in addition to the poem, and several drafts of the script, portray black mermaids as distinct characters with different personalities, lives, and conflicts. On my tumblr, I frequently tag images “black mermaids” that inform my idea of these characters. In that particular gif, I am excited and moved by a collective group of black women moving to their own beat but also preserving something together, in that case music. My mermaids preserve spirits and memory in the water, though they may swim in different directions.

LM: Your past work while non-traditional in theme, exist in a more realist genre. In Deluge you are pushing the boundaries of magical realism and Afrofuturism. Why must this story be told through this lens?

My films often address themes of duality in black women and girls, or a certain twoness of being in multiple worlds while in one body. I’m also interested in personal versus public perceptions of self. Whether it’s duality of identity, religion, culture, sexuality, or race, I find the textures of these struggles compelling in the film form.

I’m also interested in subverting people’s ideas of what a “political” film or medium is. While my films may be tagged political, they are actually very personal stories about people undergoing some type of conflict, and often universal in their themes.

Deluge, while venturing into a more magical realm, centers on a character who is also between two worlds- her New Orleans family, friends, and community pre-drowning, and one of water trauma and black mermaids post-drowning. She is a precocious, intelligent girl who comes of age during this experience.

LM: You will be working with Charles Burnett, the director of Killer of Sheep (1977) and To Sleep with Anger (1990). Why did you choose this director as your faculty adviser?

This semester, I took a class with Charles called Advanced Staging. Under his guidance, students stage scenes from their scripts or existing films in class. This was one of the most beneficial classes I’ve taken as a filmmaker and student. As reflected in his films, specifically Killer of Sheep and To Sleep With Anger, Charles is the “master” of the moving master shot. There is something innate and instinctual inside of him that makes it all seem so easy. In class, he offers insight into how the camera can move with characters, flowing in and out of space as fluid as the mood evoked in the scene itself. This type of instruction is invaluable and I’m grateful to have it as I conceive of the visual design for Deluge. This is a film about water, about fluidity, but also about the roaring tide of trauma, and above all else, this will be a film that moves. Burnett’s films get at the core of family, of loss, and of history in a way that makes me want to step into them and dance alongside them. His insight on our project is invaluable in more ways than one can imagine.

LM: One aspect of this film that immediately caught my attention was your collaboration with conceptual artist Kenyatta AC Hinkle. Why did you chose to work so closely with a conceptual artist?

Kenyatta is a visual artist and writer who also attends Calarts. Her work extends across mediums and borders into explorations of lineage, personal geography, the power of naming, and black hair. We’re honored to work with her. It was extremely important for me to capture the image of the black mermaid characters early on so we’d be able to communicate our vision to potential costumers, art department, and film personnel, as well as to brand ourselves with an image the represents this stage of the project. The mermaid logo for our campaign contains the image that Hinkle designed. That is the “Merma” character in the script, and that image will be part of the poster rewards that contributors receive.

LM: Creatives are constantly fundraising for their projects. What makes Deluge especially important to support? What sets this narrative apart from other narratives?

You know, I’m always careful about presenting my work as “the first film that...” or in a way that brings down others.

Ultimately, this is a story that won’t leave me alone. It’s a story and film that keeps me up way into the night obsessing and worrying about whether everything will come together in time to make it. It’s story that has enveloped my being and probably will until it’s picture-locked.

I hope that dedication, that passion, the dozens of script rewrites, and determination translates into the project that people are reading about and thinking about as they browse our Indiegogo campaign. I want people to want to become submerged in this narrative.

LM: With all the excitement around this film, what aspects of the film are your nervous about?

Filmmaking is the ultimate test of nervousness but that usually means you’re passionate and will put that nervousness to the test. At this stage, I really have to trust my nervousness as a sign that all the hard work we’ve put in thus far will result in a project that accomplishes what we set out to do. For the past six months, I’ve lived in this elevated state of emotion, frustration, and excitement. I don’t think it will soon end. The test is to preserve my mind and body as the countdown continues.

LM: As a filmmaker, whose work -- film, literature, music, etc. inspires your work?

Oh my, so many people.

Right now I’m thinking of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s work- Amores Perros and Biutiful. He has a compelling way of layering stories and emotion into a cohesive narrative and the impact is always so visceral and earned.

I’m also thinking a lot about Haile Gerima and my experience taking his Third World Cinema class at Howard University. I don’t think I’d be the storyteller I am now without his insight.

I’m also thinking about Martha Southgate’s most recent novel, The Taste of Salt. I finished it in one night and stayed up thinking about it for hours. It’s a cross-generational exploration of one black woman’s relationship with water and the ocean, reflected in her family’s alcoholism, and her career as a marine biologist. This book serves as one of the main reference texts for Deluge.

I could go on and on but I have to say that I’m really moved by people. The people moving through world daily, and trying to figure out which way to go. I make movies that reflect them. I make movies for them. -END-

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"The U.S. is utopia achieved" / America by Jean Baudrillard {reading notes}

2015-10-04T23:51:00.000-04:00

Originally published in 1986 and reissued by Verso last year, America by the late French social critic and philosopher Jean Baudrillard is a must read. The books traces the author's thoughts as he crosses the American landscape à la Tocqueville. Baudrillard critiques and meditates on the nature of American cities including New York but especially Los Angeles, unpacking the city's "superficial" reputation. In a chapter entitled Astral America he writes:

There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night. A sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity, stretching as far as the eye can see, bursting out from the cracks in the clouds...The muted fluorescence of all the diagonals: Wilshire, Lincoln, Sunset, Santa Monica. Already flying over San Fernando Valley, you come upon the horizontal infinite in every direction. But once you are beyond the mountain, a city ten times larger hits you. You will never have encountered anything that stretches as far as this before. Even the sea cannot match it, since it is not divided up geometrically.

Far from fawning over the city, Baudrillard points out how the construction and layout of Los Angeles symbolizes America's infatuation with the abundant and the never-ending. In comparing Europe to America he writes:

[Europe] should not judge [America's] crisis as we would judge our own, the crisis of the old European countries. Ours is a crisis of historical ideals facing up to the of their realization. [America's] is the crisis of an achieved utopia, confronted with the problem of its duration and permanence. The Americans are not wrong in their idyllic conviction that they are the center of the world, the supreme power, the absolute model for everyone. And this conviction is not so much founded on natural resources, technologies, and arms as on the miraculous premise of a utopia made reality, of a society which, with a directness we might judge unbearable, is built on the idea that it is the realization of everything the others have dreamt of -- justice, plenty, rule of law, wealth, freedom: it knows this, it believes in it, and in the end, the others have come to believe in it too.

He also looks at the nature of television and it's place in American society, the nature of America's deserts and open spaces, Reagan-era politics and much more. By the end of the book you will understand Baudrillard's conviction that California may be the logical (if not tragic) result of everything the West has ever believed in ... dope read!

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Originally Posted 7/22/2011 & 5/6/2013

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"The nauseating stench that oozes from the wound" / In Defense of Chris Brown

2015-10-04T23:50:00.001-04:00

“Let’s pray for him.” These words tumbled sarcastically out of my BFF’s mouth a couple of weeks ago during a routinely short phone conversation. The subject of our conversation—the ‘him’ in question—was Chris Brown, who just hours earlier, had concluded the public relations disaster that was his appearance on “Good Morning America” with Robin Roberts. Yes, let’s bow our heads.

As a preemptive strike against the barrage of rage-filled responses likely to follow this post, let me clarify my stance: this is not an essay condoning Brown’s arguably immature angst-filled outburst, or those of similarly volatile men who, like Brown, have committed vile acts of aggression towards women. By all accounts, the data that details the myriad of ways in which violence towards us, as women, is perpetuated by male figures in our lives is grim. In her essay, “Feminist Focus on Men: A Comment,” bell hooks reports that “half of all married women are victims of male violence, one girl in four is a victim of male incest, one woman in three is raped.” Those of us who have nursed a sistah, a sister, a mother, a daughter, an aunt—or ourselves—back to health following a physical and/or emotional assault recognize that behind each sobering statistic is a bruised face, a broken bone, a ravaged body, a splintered self, or a shattered soul.

But if we, as black people, choose not to look carefully at the type of monster that Brown represents, the trope that he embodies—if we fail to ask ourselves about his origins and motivations, if we refuse to question why and how he has survived in our midst—then we’re likely to continue to generate, in our private and public interactions, the very fodder that allows him to survive and appear masked and disguised as our brothers, boyfriends, husbands, fathers, and sons.

At 21, Brown has just grazed the precipice of black manhood within the confines of a society where black men and black women occupy two different social planets, each spinning on its own axis, traveling on its own orbit. Is it any wonder that from him emanates a childish aura that betrays his confusion? Hair salons and nail shops are filled with pervasive chit-chatter about the shortage of black men, period; ‘good ones,’ it seems, are a relic. In those spaces, there are abundant testimonies offered as indisputable evidence that ‘niggas ain’t shit.’

Somewhere along this lonely road to Damascus, public discourse on black male-female relationships has stalled. It’s stuck between DC socialite turned—dear God, help us all—self-declared relationship guru Helena Andrews’ Bitch is the New Black, and thrice married comedian turned self-appointed relationship-guru Steve Harvey’s Think Like a Lady and Act Like a Man. A perfunctory glance at excerpts from these texts will reveal this to even the casual reader: both authors offer instructions on whom, when, and how to date (or not), and yet neither explicitly tells us how to love. The difference between the two worlds is substantial.

Chris Brown personifies the nauseating stench that oozes from the wound housed in our individual and shared experiences as black men and women. Yes, he is not entirely of our making—the wound that he represents has been exacerbated by centuries of emasculation, and prolonged physical and mental enslavement, the reasons for and consequences of which are better elaborated on by historians and sociologists. But he is ours.

I’m applying war paint on my face, planting my feet firmly on the ground, and standing staunchly by Chris Brown. After all, he is my brother, boyfriend, husband, father, and son—he is my other; therefore, his wounds are my wounds, and vice versa. If I—as his sister, girlfriend, wife, mother, and daughter—don’t love him back from the brink of implosion, then who will? If I, as a black woman, can’t will him back to life, then who can? Yes, let’s pray to Nyasaye, Mungu, Ngai, Yesu Christo, and all others we call God for him—let’s pray that he retreats into solitude and finds healing for and respite from the pain that is searing through his soul. And let’s pray the same for ourselves.

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by Nyaugenya

(Originally Posted 4/7/2011)

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Speak, So You Can Speak Again

2015-10-04T23:49:00.000-04:00

Pull up Michael Jackson's first Moonwalk. Incredible concert, huh? I mean this is MJ’s coming out party, the day he dazzled the world. His performance was so arresting comedian Richard Pryor is alleged to have declared it “the great performance [he’d] ever seen.”

And what did the man of the hour think of his act...

/////“I remember doing the performance so clearly, and I remember that I was so upset with myself, cause it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted it to be more.”/////

It appears MJ was disappointed because he intended to hold the crouching position he assumed at the 3:43 mark for a teeny bit longer but was unable to maintain his balance. In criticizing his inability to execute this well-practiced move, MJ failed to appreciate how he effortlessly turned that “mistake” into a perfect 360’ turn that added another layer to an already rich assembly of dance moves.

Was the audience aware of this “costly” mistake? Judging from the feedback, it is safe to assume not. The entire conversation was taking place in Mike’s head. As humorous as Mike’s self-criticisms sounds in light of the performance, think about how many of us freeze up after sharing our creative work in a public setting over similar trivialities. I am not talking about building up the courage to do it initially. According to a [NY times article], starting is a relatively simple act for writers. I am referring to the moments after. The third article you submit to a magazine or the fourth blog posting you set out to write after receiving major accolades for the “brilliance” of the first three. Those days when your words appear jilted, flat, rhythm-less, unreflecting of the genius we imagine ourselves to posses. I think MJ’s self-criticisms are a fitting space to convene a discussion around writer’s block, but even more crucial, self-confidence. The following is a set of examples culled from the biography of MJ that has helped me manage those moments when self-doubt creeps in and interrupts the creative process.

1. Be in Conversation
Mike constantly shot his ideas past Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross. At 17, he asked and received permission from Stevie Wonder to observe him while Songs in the Key of Life was made. Being in conversation requires opening yourself to wisdom from elders by listening and sharing. As the great jazz musicians remind us, you can only improvise once you’ve mastered a subject. MJ was constantly in conversation, not only with his musical superiors but also his peers. "Billie Jean" and "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" were playful collaborations between him, his brother Randy and his sister Janet.

Sharing our work with others strips the ego of its power, particularly its selfish desire to keep thoughts contained within the mind. Artists will tell you that the recording process is usually a collective effort, with folk offering lines that support the artists’ lyrical intent. The same applies to book authors where a perusal of the acknowledgments section invariably features the author giving props to several colleagues and mentors for specific ideas or general theoretical directions. Being in conversation relieves you of trying to construct a masterpiece without a blueprint. No man lives on an island.

There is another crucial aspect of being in conversation illustrated in MJ’s life. As John Jeremiah Sullivan, the author of the insightful GQ article, “Back in the Day,” tells us, “Michael yearn[ed] for... competition.” While, “fading child stars can easily insulate themselves from further motivation, if they wish, and most do... Michael seeks pressure instead... He recruits people who can drive him to... higher effort.” In seeking this demanding mentorship, Michael placed himself in a position to continuously expand. I used to believe that the ultimate aim was to reach an adequate level of consistency and articulation that would then flat-line and require nothing more than simple maintenance. This belief contradicted the laws of nature. Either something is expanding or it is contracting. By committing oneself to growth, I am allowing myself to discover something new daily, from project to project, moment to moment. Now, there is no such pressure to reach a particular goal, a linear based model that discourages risking. The journey itself is the goal, and as such, precludes the need for judgment from the craft. Whether a particular writing is considered good or bad, the fundamental goal is to write, and that goal should operate as the exclusive measure of one’s ability. For Mike, staying in touch with his “childlike inner instrument” was essential. Children are always seeking a new adventure, even in seemingly old rituals. Identifying a level, or what he termed “big” music, always resulted in Mike’s worst production. Interestingly, Sullivan informs us he associated “big” music with military imagery.

2. Operating from a Perspective of Abundance.
I grew discouraged my senior year of college, actually really depressed by the biographies I was reading because it seemed the only success I could have was through “killing the father.” The scholars I admired all seemed to achieve their success by aggressively attacking those that preceded them. It was not until I read Jacob Carruthers Intellectual Warfare that I understood this intellectual patricide was a product of the Western tradition.

Through his work, I realized the source of my anxieties stemmed from the belief that my “shine” crowded out the possibility of another person's “shine.” It sprang from notions of scarcity, the idea that there was simply not enough light for everyone to bask in. Like the proverbial gunner on the basketball team, my forty points meant most of the other cats on my team would barely touch the rock.

Shifting the conversation however, I am discovering that there is more than enough light to go around—as long as I am in conversation. Unlike the ball hog example, an alternative representation is the drum line. The drummers keep the beat for the dancers as a unit. Still, there is a moment for each drummer to step up and showcase his/her individual talent before rejoining the drum line. In so doing, the drummer contributes to the overall music being played rather than takes away. This perspective is also more in tune with nature. To think that expressing yourself is taking away from someone else is an indication of alienation, the stubborn belief that there is a “you” disconnected from your surroundings that can actually take away. If all of the elements in the universe are present in you however, then your personal expression is a gift back to the universe. Mike, once again, instructs us:

/////“Deep inside I feel that this world we live in is really a big, huge, monumental symphonic orchestra. I believe that in its primordial form, all of creation is sound and that it’s not just random sound, that it’s music.”/////

This Is It
So, the short of this blog posting is to encourage writers and artists in general to keep at their craft, despite whatever misgivings we may encounter along the way. Mike’s self-criticisms did not deter him from continuing; it emboldened him to keep striving for excellence. The trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie put it this way: “the only wrong note is when you stop playing.” Anyone who had a chance to see the recent documentary on MJ, This Is It, will support Gillespie’s statement. This Is It was marketed as his final performance but what came across instead was the opportunity to observe someone who had mastered his craft to the point he embodied it. The “It” for Mike was his transcendence over his material self, to the point we witness his plucking notes out of the air. His physical self may have ceased but we get to see him depart his physical form before he physically departed the earth. We can all arrive at that point. The trick is to keep writing. Keep performing. Keep dancing. In the words of Zora Neale Hurston, "speak, so you can speak again."

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(Originally posted 11/18/2009)

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Hurricane Katrina

2015-10-04T23:43:00.000-04:00

We must be mindful in assessing a "crisis" solely as "emotional turmoil." As good ol' Webster states, "crisis," is the point in a story or drama when a conflict reaches its highest tension and must be resolved--either through improvement or deterioration. That is, its irreversible change. In ancient Greek lexicon, it was invoked to signify a "turning point" with regards to disease. As such, 'crisis' can be seen as a crucible or a black box of sorts. Whatever its realization, it permanently alters and emits new understandings, new realities from the sum of its input.

It is within this context that we turn towards the media-dubbed crisis, Hurricane Katrina, and in our usage of "crisis" as a reference point, will demonstrate that far from being a crisis, Katrina is on a fast-track to become another unfortunate (and preventable) incident for the Africana world. Much of the bungling of Hurricane Katrina can be found in its reporting.

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, media pundits tumbled over one another to report horrific stories intended to shock the nation. These ranged from brutal child rapes to countless acts of barbaric violence. The veracity of these accounts have since been challenged, and for the most part, proven false. To be sure, the hysteria generated by the media was likely calculated to direct attention to the situation. Nonetheless, their inability to garner support otherwise is telling of the misguided 'philanthropy' which ensued.

While the country has rushed to alleviate the immediate conditions of those in need, the larger factors that made the situation possible are never addressed. As Cornel West astutely observed shortly after Katrina struck, "New Orleans was a third world long before the hurricane." Adolph Reed concurs, stating that "what happened in New Orleans is the culmination of twenty-five years of disparagement of any idea of public responsibility--led by the right but as part of a bipartisan consensus--to reduce government’s function to enhancing plunder by corporations and the wealthy and punishing everyone else." This method of reporting finds precedent in former situations such as slavery, colonialism, and the recent genocides that wracked (and are wracking) the African continent.

Appealing more to emotional bases presumes that the larger state apparatus is perfectly healthy and the “situation” is an anomaly. Consequently, there has been scant mention of the observations of West, Reed, and a host of others. Yet, it is precisely this type of investigation that would aid in preventing this type of occurrence in the future. In other words, one needs to go beyond the search for culprits or mere explanations of how it happened. In its stead, energies should be focused on establishing the proper institutions and mechanisms that can prevent it from occurring elsewhere.

As one historian remarked with regard to the Rwandan genocide, "Was it necessary for the Rwandan genocide to occur in order to begin asking which lessons could be drawn?" Meaning simply, were the horrors of slavery and colonialism, the indiscriminate violence and heinous crimes of inhumane proportions that characterized each, really, not lesson enough? Similarly, New Orleans' murder rate prior to the storm was spectacularly chilling, social services such as health care and education were faintly existent, and yet it barely registered as a blip on the country’s moral radar.

Thus, the very irony of Hurricane Katrina could be found in its projection as a cause celebre. In this light it shouldn’t be surprising that the very mechanisms put into place to ensure American dominance of Iraq are being reproduced in the Gulf Region. The framing of Iraq, even amongst many anti-war circles, never reached its proper framing as one of "humanitarian crisis." Political scientist Michael Dawson illustrated this in an article entitled, "Blacks, Whites Live in Different Moral Universes." In the article, he examines the moral codes of blacks and whites that steered movements appearing similar in appearance but were radically different in its understanding of the situation.

Blacks, he contends, were anti-war (in Iraq) because of the human atrocities being inflicted upon human beings. White anti-war groups’ criticisms were oriented towards the realization that America could not win the war (the oft-repeated statement that Bush didn’t send enough troops) and not that the invasion of sovereign territory itself, or the killing of innocent human beings, was ethically wrong. Similar postures of the latter were taken with regards to the Vietnam War, invasion of Grenada, Haitian occupation, and so forth.

We can thus see that when core issues which emphasize standards of universal human conduct are swept under the rug, history is invited to repeat itself. Consequently we can see parallels in New Orleans. Soon after Katrina’s gushing winds had settled, charities, corporations, and the rarely mentioned private security firms, began to heavily dot the region.

The private security firms represented contingents’ fresh from battle in Iraq (Blackwater) and military duty in Israel (Instinctive Shooting International). Lest we mention the local paramilitary groups that sprouted up to defend the "sovereign integrity" of their neighborhoods from 'looters' (read: niggers). This has made for remarkable cohabitations. Key land developers and wealthy elites who have always abhorred the presence of deigned feral blacks have hired these mercenaries to conduct the unpleasant work of rooting out and forcibly removing those who don’t (and, because of their very existence, can’t) share their vision of a new corporate state.

Nation columnist Naomi Klein provides some insight: "One of the images that really stuck in my mind is the conversion of a huge Wal-Mart into a military base in downtown New Orleans. They call it, "Camp Wal-Mart." For those surprised at this corroboration of government and corporations, one needs only to read Klein’s April 14 article in "The Nation" on "Disaster Capitalism."

Interestingly enough, this article came in the wake of last year’s tsunami, a topic that has been curiously stamped "closed" in the public’s imagination. Suffice to say, there exists clear red tape that can be traced between the two events. That we are now confronted with the reality of a Katrina Diaspora should come as no surprise.

For those who recall the atrocious handling of the Mississippi Floods of 1927, where Black prisoners were forced to act as human levees to quell flooding and black residents were herded into refugee camps, Katrina should reek of parallels. It should also surprise no one that media reporters are being accorded more deference for their orchestrated rescues, while those who braved uncertainty, find themselves in new, strange lands with little to no money in reserve, forge ahead, determined to make way for their families.

They’re now invisible and attempts to focus on their plight only annoy folk who want to move to the next story/situation. Even the outrage over their social designation as "refugees" misses the point; for what is a refugee but one who is shorn of state protection. So, as predictable, Hurricane Katrina has faded into obscurity. Its coverage on the news endured as long as ratings were up and folks were feeling cheerfully charitable.

Whether it’ll achieve the designation of a "crisis" is as much a result of this generation as it is historical circumstance. Certainly, if it is to be so, it must be sui generis. As of now, it merely merits a place in the unfortunate, stark reminders, of our precarious and vulnerable position in this country.

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by Melvin Barrolle (The Liberator Magazine 4.5 #13)

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Where Are We? / Caution & The Celebratory Instinct

2015-10-04T10:20:00.000-04:00

"The way the people who still remembered talked of them, these had been festivals made for keeping a people together. They were not so much celebrations as invocations of wholeness"
(Armah, The Healers, 1978).

Where is our popular social movement for Africana Studies? Our enslaved ancestors and those who organized together for human rights, Black art, Black power, and Black studies are ashamed.

Humans who commune and study with their African ancestors will win authentic (read: Black; like Haitian independence) liberty and justice, healthy family and education — in community context. That is the only way to win. All other movements have already been assimilated; thus defeated.

How about an example.

Where is our popular support for Black screenwriters?; as a "voluntary minority" (choosing to stay "safely" within our colonial borders) we can't just apply "The Secret" and mimic a narrow celebratory culture and claim progress lest we be liars and hypocrites before the world and history.

No, if we want to control our destiny we must intelligently, collectively organize — meaning speak out, push our friends and family — regarding where our support goes and does not go (mainly on the mainstream level, and on the daily subliminal level, with our choices of what we share and promote). Social networking is the television, and thus advertising network, of the new millennium and we are now our own advertising, programming, and network executives. The wager is that we are sufficiently trained to not divert from idol worship and advertising ("sharing" and "posting" spectacularistic content) even though we've been given new democratic tools.

Religiously rooting for pretty black faces and bodies slowly destroys the idols we worship (look at what D'Angelo and Lauryn Hill said y'all did to them; before Facebook and Twitter dominance) and retards our group progress.

We are failing to peer behind the curtain that sits just to the side of the hologram. We must be vigilant in our support of the art and reject the worship of, and even participation in, the spectacle if we want to win now.

White Capital will simply give us an infinite amount of black faces to clap for, cheer for, and "feel good" about while White Intellect drafts our narratives (The Butler, Long Walk To Freedom, The Help, 42, Mother Of George, Newlyweeds, Winnie, Gimme The Loot). Add to that, 12 Years A Slave was written by a black man who wrote an article for Esquire called "The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger" (I'm not even going to link to it).

So that leaves us with the limited portfolio of... Terence Nance? (An Oversimplification Of Her Beauty) — a narcissist black hipster riding Michel Gondry's you-know-what — and the great Tyler Perry (Madea ad infinitum); with honorable mentions to the fledglings Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station) and Ava DuVernay (I Will Follow, Middle Of Nowhere).

Wake up already. Coogler and DuVernay are a good start, but our level of ogling is like throwing up the Black Power sign an eighth of the way through a marathon.

Either way, the era of Obama is about to be over and we are about to be snapped back to reality real quick. Organize, organize, organize: meaning, we all need to be a lifetime member or active supporter of at least one multi-gendered familial Black community-centered institution (in addition to whatever special interest groups we join) in combination with making the personal political as executives of the neo-network. If you aren't then you need to start looking and stop worshiping images and momentary emotional highs. We should actually be considering organizing boycotts of black moving images controlled by White letters. We might also consider being greater promoters of work than of artists; "liking" albums on Facebook rather than living musicians (brands), for example. This might, in turn, give artists space and encourage them to take part in the community as normal people expected to take in the canonical works of the African diaspora intellectual tradition just as anyone else would be expected to.

If this were 1963, our ancestors might understand us viewing the ascendancy of Negro faces as real progress. But this is 2014; the new millennium is all about taking advantage of our celebratory instinct. Black art, power, and studies exist and we are supposed to be sophisticated enough to decipher between real and simulated progress.

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Writer and Director James Spooner On "Afro Punk: The Rock And Roll Nigger Experience"

2015-10-04T10:10:00.000-04:00

Days in which subcultures dominate the scene and Hip Hop has taken the forefront, a new movement is emerging with the possibility of creating a counter part to Hip Hop in urban areas around the world. A culture that was once identified with racist White kids, and often times misconstrued with alternative religious methods and a need to be different, has managed to find the glue to unite outcast Black youth from around the country. This new movement defined by its founder as “Afro Punk” started to emerge with the help of one of America's well-known Afro Punks -- a brother by the name of James Spooner. Spooner is the director of “Afro Punk: The Rock and Roll Nigger Experience,” a 66-minute documentary dedicated to tackling the hard questions, such as the issues of loneliness, exile, and Black power that sparked the Afro Punk movement.

What follows is a candid conversation I had with Mr. Spooner in his Brooklyn office regarding the concept behind the film and what is was like growing up as a Black punk rocker in a little desert town in California and then moving back to Brooklyn.

Bob: So where did you first discover punk rock music?

James: I first discovered Punk rock in California; we lived in this little desert town. The first punk rocker I met was this Black kid named Travis. I was a skate border and on the first day of school I saw this kid who had on combat boots and his jeans were all ripped up and he had like flannel wrapped around his waist, leather jacket and stuff and I was like damn who is that dude. Something was attractive about him. He just seemed like the coolest kid, you know. At the time I was in to skate boarding, and at that time -- not so much nowadays -- punk rock was the soundtrack for skate boarding. So even though I listened to Hip Hop all my friends listened to punk so I was just kind of hearing it and got into a couple of bands. So I met this kid and we could rap and we had bands to talk about. So I didn’t even think that Black people couldn’t be involved in Punk because the first Punk in my world was Black. Quickly I found out that was not the case you know; I was dealing with these kids that were racist. The first time I had been called a nigger was by a punk rocker. So I had to deal with that, like, in your face people would come up to me and say things like, "yo, you better watch your back cause I heard these kids talking about they are going to jump you for your boots." You know that kind of shit, so you know it was a rough time. So then like a year later we moved to New York and there were all kinds of punks of color.

So when you first came to New York were you excited about the diversity within Punk culture?

I was going through a lot at the time keep in mind when you’re 13 you’re like being peer pressured, you just wanna fit in but your creating your identity. And I was going through a lot of shit you know, while I was still in Cali. The Black kids at the school were young crips and were hounding me, so it was like, okay. They see a Black kid who’s not down with them and who is into this other shit so it was always like “why ain’t you down with the Black mafia gangster crips?” I’m like: “Black mafia who?” While I’m wearing plaid bondage pants. So I had a lot of harassment from those kids. Then I had all these White kids that were cool to my face but I would go in their room and they would have swastikas and shit and somehow they would justify it like, “oh you’re Black but those kids are niggers” and at that age I was ready to except that you know, it created self-hate. It doesn’t get much lighter then me but I would still look in the mirror like “I wish I was lighter, wish I had smaller lips.” I just wished the Black stuff would just go away so I wouldn’t be harassed by everybody.

When did you start to gain knowledge-of-self? Cause after reading up on the Afro Punk movement, it seems as though you are conscious of your situation and of other Black punk rockers, so when would you say that the consciousness and Black pride started to kick in?

That was way down the line -- I fluctuated. I moved to New York and all of a sudden I found all kinds of kids of color that were into punk and I wasn't actively seeking out kids of color but it turned out that way, although I still had White friends. There was this band called Bushman and they were a all-Black punk band and I used to worship the singer, this kid named Brian, and he was just a few years older then me and he was cool to me and this was my second show in NY. He gave me a flier and put me on the list, and I showed up at this show and they were all Black, there were brothers with green dreads, it was like the wildest band I had ever seen and it made so much sense you know, it felt right. They talked about racism and unity -- all the shit a 14-year-old wants to hear, especially at that time; you don’t wanna hear that segregation is real and alive, you wanna hear unity, you wanna hear my Black friends my White friends and we’re all cool. I had a lot of people of color around me and it was cool it made me not have to think about stuff you know. Then the New York hardcore scene got really violent and it got kinda gang influenced. All these cliques and crews and this posse wants beef with this posse, and I was never one of those posse-up kinda kids. So then I became straight edge [drug free] and there were no straight edge kids left, so I stop going to bars -- keep in mind I am like 15 -- so I started going to shows in Jersey and Pennsylvania and Boston. So, on Friday night I would be like “peace mom,” and be out for the weekend.

Were there other Black kids at these shows you were going to?

Nah, but I really didn’t think about it, I just wanted to find kids that were cool and artistic, and that were non-violent -- where people were coming to shows to see a show. The shows in the suburbs were a lot more community-based. Everybody had a record label and everybody was selling records at the show it was like people in New York were spoiled. It was like if you wanted to get a record you could just go to the record store and get it. In the suburbs it was not the case, so the kids created like there own commerce, and it was real exciting for me, I didn’t really think, “oh there are really no Black kids here.” It was not until a few years later that I started to question it again. I was hanging out in the scene called EMO [Emotional Hardcore] which had just started around this time which was like ’93, ’94. All these sensitive kids, you know. So, hanging out with these EMO kids and their style at that time was tight, high-water pants and they all had bangs, so I wanted to be like my friends, right? So I found myself wanting to look like these White kids. So when I finally cut off my dreads I went through like this three-month bad hair period, where I like didn’t know what to do and then I got a perm so I could have that hairdo. At that point I had a total breakdown like, “oh they are right, I am trying to be White.” Somehow I justified it to myself and had that perm for like 4 years, so if you look at my hair now it is kind of straight but when it grows it curls up so I had this big straight hair with these bangs, it was really crazy looking and at the time I am like still dealing with all these White folks. You know I kinda dropped out of the punk scene and was kinda dealing more with like Rock n’ Roll. I guess after you turn 21 and start going to bars and hanging out with the NY Rock n’ Roll scene, or whatever, in that journey, I just started questioning everything. So I asked one day what the fuck am I doing? My father is from Saint Lucia so I went to go visit him in Saint Lucia and when I got there it was a life changing experience I realized that the blinders had been on for so long and I got really angry so I came home cut off the perm broke it off with my White girlfriend -- it was all part of this, like, cleansing you know. You know, reclamation. And I just started building from there and was like, “I really wanna tell this story.” I wanted to make a movie that I wanted to see when I was like 14. If I would have had someone that I respected explain it to me, like if I would have been able to see my peers talk about it, I would not have had to go through all the shit, cause you know mom and dad could have like said something but who listens to their parents when they’re 14. So I needed to have like a manual saying, “this is what you are going through and you don’t have to. You are not alone and here are some examples of some options -- seeing what some other folks are doing.”

So with Afro Punk now being a movement that is making waves around the country, what came first the concept for the movement or the concept for the film?

Oh, just the film. I remember while making it I would go to shows a lot more and I started seeing a lot of things I had never scene. The way that race worked in the scene. I got this documentary about Latin Punk, there was like this one scene in it where they like scanned the crowd and it was all Latino Punks. I remember thinking like fuck man we will never have that, we don’t speak our own language we don’t have anything to unite us then I went to go see this one women perform -- and in New York at some shows they will have like 5 bands that have nothing to do with each other like one band will come on and play then the next and everybody will come and see one band then leave and then the next and leave -- so at this show, before the person I went to see came on there was this Japanese Punk band and there were like 200 kids crammed in this little spot; all Japanese kids, bands singing in Japanese, there’s a Japanese mosh pit, Japanese kids Jumping off-stage I was like, “this is amazing.” I was like one of seven people in the whole place that was not Japanese.

So while thinking of the concept behind Afro Punk what did you find as a common thread among Black punks?

When I started traveling around showing the movie and seeing who was showing up to see the movie -- I think it first hit me in Toronto where the first screening was nuts, it was like a 300 people seat theater and there were like hundreds of people waiting on the rush line, just in case they could get a ticket -- I was like “what the fuck?” They were all Black. I was like “wow I never would have had to make this movie if I had known that so many Black people were down with this already,” you know, wanting to see a Black punk. So I started doing the screenings and finding out that like Black people, mainstream people are not that different from one another, and that we all have this one thing in common and that is the oppression that we live under. Whether you are college educated or the kid on the corner, somebody sees you as a nigger. It sucks to be united under White supremacy but, the reality is that we did not know we were Black until White people told us we were Black, you know, race did not even exist until White supremacy existed. So, if we have to be united by the fact that we are not them, at least we can still be united. So then I started putting on shows and the film is getting a lot of word of mouth and everything, so I figured, let me use the film to start to put on some events, and help push other bands. So that is pretty much what I have been doing. It has gone from shows that were 30 percent Black to shows now where it is hard to find any White folks. So right now we are providing a space for those people that are looking for something the new movement consists of -- people that just go to house parties and, like, you know, their jeans just aren't that baggy, you know, people that are not into Lil’ Flip and T.I. Right now, a lot of Black people don’t feel that they have any options, and this is just an option. So the people that come are the ones that are looking for options.

Do you feel that you accomplished what you were trying to accomplish with the film?

Yeah, I am satisfied with it, it was more then I ever expected. We are coming up on our 200th screening and I never would have thought that it would go so far, especially given the fact that it is pretty much all word of mouth. It gives me energy to keep going, especially with the adversity that comes with it, you know. There might be a band that I want to introduce like a "T.V. On The Radio" or a "Bloc Party." I want to introduce them to a Black audience and introduce the audiences to these bands but we have to deal with all the bullshit that comes with being a rock star. My whole thing is like, there are no rock stars, I don’t want to put on shows where the stage is taller then us I want to have Bloc Party that sells out the Bowery ball room and have them play in a place that fits 250 people and I want those 250 people to be Black, is that wrong? What I am trying to do with Afro Punk is be very vocal about the fact that I don’t care about White validation maybe its because I grew up in the White scene and I know what that’s about, but at the end of the day, I feel like one of the problems that we deal with is consistently needing to be validated by White people. It's like our shit is not tight until White people tell us it is tight. Like Hip Hop, I remember when I was in the single digits and I remember listening to rap music and people saying, "that is a fad, I give it two years." You know what I'm saying? Like people criticizing it like "I don’t even know what they are saying." But I just liked it, like, whatever. But is it a coincidence that once White America found out that they could make money off it and they put Yo! MTV Raps on and all of a sudden everybody is Hip Hop? 35-year-old men walking down the street in like sweat suits trying to be Hip Hop, I mean everybody is Hip Hop. You then had people saying, "We are Hip Hop." Everybody in the world is trying to be like us, yeah, but only because White people told you it was cool, yeah while the White people that are running it are like "yeah you keep on thinking that as long as you keep buying the records and the apparel and buying the diamonds, you know funding all of our shit." So what I am trying to present is like, look we can do this ourselves. Everybody sweats us for a reason; cause we are talented, because poverty has forced us to invent shit. The system took away our band programs and so some kids came up with the idea of making music with two records.

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by Bob The Janitor (The Liberator Magazine 4.2)

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A Return to Kemet: Blue(s) Moods, Memory, Eloquence, and the Higher Ground

2015-10-04T09:40:00.000-04:00

Education + Institutional Memory

"This writing was copied out anew by his majesty in the House of his father Ptah-South-of-his-Wall, for his majesty found it to be a work of the ancestors which was worm-eaten, so that it could not be understood from beginning to end. His majesty copied it anew so that it might become better than it had been before, in order that his name might endure and his monument last in the House of his father Ptah-South-of-his-Wall throughout eternity, as a work done by the son of Re, Shabaka, for his father Ptah-Tatenen, so that he might live forever."
--Preface to The Memphite Theology on the order of Shabaka, Per Uah of the 25th Kemetic Dynasty, 710 b.c.e.

"Cherish study, avoid the dance, so you'll become an excellent official. Do not yearn after outdoor pleasures, hunting and fishing; shun boomerang throwing and the chase. Write diligently by day; recite at night. Let your friends be the papyrus roll and the scribal palette; such work is sweeter than wine. Indeed writing, for one who knows it, is far better than all other professions, pleasanter than bread and beer, more delightful than clothes and perfumed ointments, more precious than a legacy in Kemet, than a tomb in the West."
--Neb-Maa-Re Nakht, Royal Scribe (Sesh Nesw), 20th Kemetic Dynasty, c. 1500 b.c.e.

The legendary W.E.B. DuBois was known for his passionate moderation. In bed daily by eleven p.m. A remarkably disciplined reader and writer who planned research agendas with daily tasks over years and kept to them with low tolerance for interruption. A literal human metronome of consistency and intellectual productivity.

In writing about the Reconstruction period in U.S. history, Dr. DuBois captured a strikingly similar combination of intellectual passion, consistency and productivity as he marked the determination of "an entire race" to go to school in the wake of the end of the U.S. Civil War. As Mary Bethune would remark before Congress in 1939, within several generations, a people who had been pressed into functional illiteracy in the reading and writing of the English language had produced generations of students who had mastered the language and set out to dismantle the system that had required their miseducation. Ms. Bethune and Dr. DuBois (pictured here in the famous 1936 photograph taken on the steps of Frederick Douglass Hall with Adelaide Cromwell, Monroe Work, Charles Wesley, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Arturo Schomburg and Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, among others as they worked on the landmark Encyclopedia of the Negro) were only two among the ranks of pioneering scholar-educators who traced the institutional memory of the African quest for education in the United States. As we engaged in line for line readings and translations of two of the most famous texts in Kemetic literature, the consideration of the origins of reality in the so-called Memphite Theology and a mediation on the field and functionof intellectual life as distinct from all other field of labor entitled The Instructions of Dua-Khety (more commonly known as The Satire of the Trades), our students opened a deep and energized consideration of the fact that the African-American quest for education has its roots in the dawn of the human experience.

At the center of Africana intellectual work is respect for the process of reading and writing and the determination to provide methods for collective learning. The notion of the group "learning community" has its origins in Kemet. From the Kemetic sites of scholarly instruction (known as the "Per Ankh" or "House of Life") to evidence of scholarly achievement ranging from the step pyramid (shown here behind Jazelle Hunt) and the stone structures of Imhotep that enclose it through the great convenings of scholars trained in Arabic, Songhai and other scripts at the great centers of learning at Timbuktu and Jenne in the 16th and 17th centuries; straight through the rites of intergenerational learning in Western and Eastern Africa that inspired Lord Baden-Powell to return to England and found The Explorers (the model for the subsequent Boy and Girl Scouts); to the collective struggle of Africans to retain the high skills and crafts of their home societies and to learn enough of each other's languages and skills to survive and resist enslavement while ship-bound; through the genius of their descendants to inherit those cultural markers and to pour them into educational institutions called Abakua, Poro and Maroon or Mason, Order of Eastern Star and Mutual Aid and Relief Society.

The Historically Black College and University has inherited these Maroon sensibilities and the traditions of communal, collective learning that they represent. In the U.S., schools began to convene in hush harbors and one room cabins, far different than the imposing stone structures we have borne witness to so far in Kemet. Yet some things have remained the same: the determination to right that which is wrong; to rebuild anew, better than before. To shape the future in ways that respect the contributions of the past in ways that do not deify the ancestors while listening to the wisdom that their experiences provide.

Today, we set forth for the temples preserved on the Island of Philae. When next we blog, I hope to continue this discussion of how the texts we have begun to consider in great detail capture the tone and tenor of Africana approaches to intellectual work. (source)

Need not question if we ruled the world

If I ruled the world
I’d free all my sons
Black diamonds and pearls
If I ruled the world
And then we’ll walk right up to the sun
Hand in hand
We’ll walk right up to the sun
We won’t land
We’ll walk right
up to the sun
Hand in hand
We’ll walk right up to the sun
We Won't Land
~Nas (Featuring Lauryn Hill), If I Ruled the World

As our bus hurtled back toward Elephantine Island and the hotel Saturday afternoon, we still had miles (kilometers here) to go before we slept, though we had met a 2:30 a.m. wake up call and departed by ferry for the bus caravan to Abu Simbel at 3:30 a.m. Since the beginning of our journey, and without sacrificing punctuality, we have emancipated time from the tyranny of the clock, and are the better for it intellectually and emotionally. Who has classes, after all, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights after a dozen hours spent traveling to, climbing into, through, over and around ancient temples and tombs in African summer weather? We do, it seems.

Abu Simbel. Barely twenty miles from the border between Egypt and the Sudan. Ramses IIs’s single most impressive monument: two temples, one to the primary Netcher of his era, Amun Ra, and the other built on behalf of his wife, Nefertari, to the glory of Het-Heru. A love story set in stone, and at once a commentary on how to unify a state around a single shared idea: the Great House. In the wake of the 40 year old Black Power/Black Studies movement and the study tours of Egypt by African-Americans that it sparked, the country should have by now rendered the sight of two dozen Black folk with cameras, pens, pads and studious expressions commonplace. Still, we arrest the attention of tourists and temple guards alike.

Ramses has emerged, with The Memphite Theology, as a particularly helpful subject informing our consideration of “The Politics of Translation” and “The Challenge of Intellectual Integrity.” Friday night we spent a spirited class session examining the parallels between the account of Ramses’s struggle with the Hittites and their allies during the epic Battle of Kadesh and Christian allegory in the Bible. The uber-Pharaoh is frequently saddled with the speculative label of being “The Pharaoh of the Exodus.” If there was an Exodus and if it happened under Ramses, all the more evidence that the Abrahammic religions are extended riffs on a Kemetic melody. As we read passages from Ramses’s plea to his father Amun to assist him and examined his dogged reproaches for seemingly being abandoned, the light in several students’ eyes shone: it was, after all, the Gethsemane and Golgotha pleas of Christ, two thousand years before, not to mention David and Goliath, Joshua at Jericho and Gideon, just for starters.

The next day, we stood in the innermost chamber of the temple, (called the “holy of holies”). This chamber is the inspiration for the pulpits that mark the sacred center of churches around the world. There are no guides allowed in the temple: in peak season (October through February), the thousands of people visiting daily would make the presence of guides in each temple proffering detailed explanations literally impossible. Still, we manage to discuss the most important scenes on the walls, columns and ceilings while absorbing the impatient urging-ons of the patrolling police and temple guards.

Having finished examining Ramses’s temple, we moved quickly to the temple for Het-Heru (the Greek Hathor) built for Nefertari (Ramses's temple is on the right, Nefertari's on the left). We entered, examining an exquisite relief of Ramses in battle, with Heru arming him with a mace of strength and, behind him, Nefertari, arms raised in protection, giving him something to return home to after fighting. The unifying concept of the Per-Uah restoring Ma’at has emerged as a constant theme as well, appearing in the well-documented efforts of Piankhy, Shabaka and Taharqua mounted at the Nubian Museum of Aswan, which actually allows visitors to get "up close and personal" with the classical artifacts. (Angie and Brittany are pictured whispering in the ears of Taharqua and Shabaka, respectively, as Robert lets us compare his face the latter Per Uah’s).

There are two reliefs in the back chamber of Nefertari’s temple, opposite the walls that framed her holy of holies. To the left, Ramses II worships his wife, with lotus flowers and Het-Heru behind him, sistrum in hand, coaching and urging him on. On the right, one of my favorite scenes, Het-Heru and Auset flanking Nefertari, breathing life into her. The royal epithet at the top of the first column of Mdw Ntr above Nefertari’s head, “Hemetch Nsw,” [King’s Wife]. The determinative for wife is a well full of water, the single most important element of creation and the thing that a human being—and a man needing a wife—cannot live without.

Friday morning, we had stood astride the Nile’s life-giving water on the bridge overlooking the Aswan High Dam. Looking downriver toward Abydos, Memphis, Saqqara and the Giza Plateau, we were reminded of the majesty and beauty of the land that thirty centuries of Black women and men had come together to create and share with the world. We surveyed the dry granite outcroppings that form the Nile’s final and northernmost of its six cataracts. Seized by the need for a mnemonic unguent, I scrolled through my Ipod’s playlist for a sufficiently powerful performance to lash the moment fast against the hard backbone of my mind’s long-term memory.

My eyes widened as the thumbwheel alit upon an Ancestral choice. I imagined Amenemhat, Ahmose, Hatchepsut, Piankhy and Ramses standing astride, along and upon the Nile, looking down the expanses of time and space and envisioning their successful efforts to realize Sma Tawi, Nsw Bity and Neb Tawi, the United Two Lands. As the dulcet harmonies of Lauryn Hill eased through my ears, the sudden turntable scratch emptied into the existential question that our children raise in the wake of perpetual challenges to their potential and doubts about their abilities, a question that evaporates when raised against the memory and vision of Kemetic serenity, permanence and relentless, unceasing movement: “Life…I wonder…Will it take me under?”
For fully three minutes, an eternity in hip hop timespace, I stood, motionless, before the Nile and the memory of the great African past, allowing Nasir Jones to resolve the seeming hopelessness of a puny and contemporary racescape against a hungry if as-yet underfed vision of what will and must be as he opined what he would do “If I Ruled the World.” His words and Lauryn’s melody catalyzed a comingling and bonding with my own mind’s eye as it played images of Pharaonic command and mass public effort, teeming all along the river’s four-thousand mile expanse over the three millennia of Kemet’s unbroken command.

“If I ruled the word/I’d free all my sons/Black diamonds and pearls/If I ruled the world…”

Our band seeps with contemplative deliberateness out of the busses and takes in each new site’s wonder: the steppes that frame the Tombs of the Nobles on Awsan’s west bank, including the tomb of Hardjuf, known as “the world’s first explorer” for his survey of inner Africa; the mirth of children in an Elephantine Island village that has been adopted by wave after wave of African-American visitors.

“Open they eyes to the lies/history’s told foul/but I’m as wise as the old owl/plus the gold child/seein things like I was controllin’/clique rollin’/truggers six digits on kicks and still holdin’/trips to Paris/I civilized every savage/give me one shot/I’ll turn trife life to lavish/political prisoners set free/stress free/no work release/purple jet skis/and M 3s…”

Saturday morning, as our little boat neared the island where the Philae Temple of Auset (Isis) has been preserved, we scanned the cliffs and foliage for the white birds whose craning necks indicated that we were looking at the descendants of Djehuty. The egret, of the ibis family were further proof that the people of Kemet were Africans. The symbols for intellectual work: the noble and silent baboon and the elegant, aloof ibis—were animals found only inside Africa, deeply beyond the reach or influence of Europe. The temple, built during the Late Period of Greek and Roman authority by Kemetic architects and designers, became the last temple where Kemetic spiritual systems were openly observed, by the Nubians. It was closed by the Roman Emperor Justinian, but not before Auset had transformed into Mary and written the “Cult of the Black Virgin” on the religious DNA of Christianity, from the re-inscribed portraits of Madonna and Child to the re-inscription of the largest single shrine to Isis in Western Europe to the Cathedral of Notre Dame (Our Lady) in Paris.

In the U.S., we have battled against the dim and vacant gaze of absence in the eyes and souls of children who have been pulled away from the excellent practice of study by distractions real and imagined. As my mind’s eye framed image after image of our students drinking in inextricable sets of life-altering images, Nas and Lauryn’s declaration evoked the answer to the seemingly intractable question, “why?” They do not do better because they do not know. They have not seen. And, after all, we need not question what we would do if we ruled the world. In fact, the lessons of Kemet remind us that we rule the worlds our imagination and deliberate, excellent effort allow us to create.

Methodology, translation + the eloquence of the scribes

“For us, the retrieval of the Egyptian heritage in all our disciplines is a first, necessary step on the way to Africa’s civilizations' rendevous with history. It is a condition we must fulfill before we can design an up-to-date corpus of disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, the foundation for the renovation of African culture. Far from being a self-indulgent fixation on the past, the examination of ancient Egypt is our wisest option if we intend to plan and create our cultural future. The heritage of Greek and Roman antiquity has had a decisive impact on Western culture. Just as profoundly, the heritage of ancient Egypt will help shape the African culture we aspire to rethink and remake.”
--Cheikh Anta Diop, Civilization or Barbarism

Yesterday afternoon, we arrived in Aswan, the southernmost border of Kemet during its early period and the gateway through which the genius of inner Africa entered the Nile Valley. The word "Aswan" is likely taken from the Kemetic Sewenet, or "trading post." Five thousand years after the unification of the various societies scattered throughout the valley by Menes, our little band of travelers found ourselves at a trading station of sorts, buying potato chips and drinks from the descendants of the original Nubian inhabitants of this region, flooded out of their villages after the construction of the High Dam in the 1960s and relocated to the city. Before evening's end, we managed to collapse time and space and convene a conversation on the power of translating ideas and information from one time to another and, in so doing, mediating a conversation between Africa past, present and future.

We'd spent the morning in Saqqara, the largest national cemetery of Kemet, a place bristling with the undisturbed graves of some of the society’s most notable figures. Kemet referred to cemeteries as the "land of the Westerners," attended by Wosir (Osiris), the governor of the West. As we entered the looming festival and pyramid complex of the 3rd Dynasty's Per Uah Djoser (2650 b.c.e.) through the hall of the world’s first stone building built by his counselor and architect Imhotep, I found myself tracing the polished limestone with my fingers, pondering the magnitude of the moment. Imhotep was revered in Kemetic memory and the Greeks identified him with as Aesculapius, the patron of physicians. The Hippocratic oath taken by doctors contains his name among the litany of figures in whose name they promise to wield their ability and judgement.

Earlier, we had spent productive time in the tombs of Ptah Hotep, [Literally "God's Peace"] and Kagemmi, two administrators of the early period, and in the burial chamber of the pyramid of Per Uah [Literally "Great House"] Pepi, of the 6th dynasty. As has been mentioned in multiple posts, Ptah Hotep's "instructions" are recognized as the first collection of wisdom teachings in world historical memory. They have been an anchoring force in my own intellectual work since I was introduced to them twenty years ago by the brilliant scholar Jacob Hudson Carruthers, Jr. (Djedi Shemsu Djehuty, or "The One Who Speaks is a Follower of Djehuty"). Dr. Carruthers, the first African American to master the ability to read and translate Medew Netcher and in many ways the father of contemporary Kemetic language studies among African-Americans, was a son of the southern Black Methodist tradition who received his college education at the hand of, among others, James Farmer, Sr. (the towering figure portrayed by Forrest Whittaker in the film account of the Wiley College debate team, The Great Debaters).

I remember standing next to Baba Djedi as we stood in the hot sand of the mammoth festival enclosure, facing Imhotep's step pyramid, in 1996. I was one of his young apprentices at the time, and had returned with my own apprentices, determined to help them enter the intellectual work I had been recruited to what seems like so long ago. As I stood there watching them take pictures, I was reminded of the importance of our work to establish a place from which to view and interpret the world and reality. The imperative of this work informed the essence of August Wilson’s famous 1996 address The Ground on Which I Stand, delivered before the national convention of the Theatre Communications Group in Princeton, New Jersey. Long tired of fighting to establish spaces where the voices and visions of African people could be presented without interpreters or mediators in the theater arts, Wilson declared the imperative of generating clear space to occupy and speak to the world from the convened authority of the Black experience.

Even in a moment when Wilson—widely lauded as the pre-eminent voice among African dramatists in the United States—declared that “we will not be denied our history, “ he evoked the Greeks as his point of remembering departure. A testimony about the nature of the “ground on which I stand and all the many grounds on which I and my ancestors have toiled” nevertheless began with Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles, continued through Shakespeare, Shaw and Ibsen and emptied into O’Neill, Miller and Williams. Africa only entered Wilson’s forceful testament with the Maroons, from Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey to Delany, Garvey and The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

The irony dripping from Wilson’s observation that “we cannot share a single value system if that value system consists of the values of white Americans based on their European ancestors” and continues with the contention that “we need a value system that includes our contributions as Africans in America” had, as with very nearly every other declaration of Africana intellectual autonomy celebrated beyond the smaller circles of long-view rememberers, constructed and embraced an Africa balanced on a temporal fulcrum constructed entirely out of the signal but amputating moment of enslavement. Try as he might, and succeed as he had, Wilson could no more transcend the limiting confines of such a framework than Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, Alvin Ailey or Maya Angelou.

In short, the grounds on which these brilliant conjurers of Africana stood were only gingerly traipsed, an unordered, wide-ranging but ultimately irreconcilable collage of sounds, images, ideas and experiences, convened to give succor and hope, comfort and voice but not context, fortifying self-consciousness and, ultimately, full-bred humanity. The struggle to voice the complex rhythms of African deep thought and long-view historical memory continues to face the challenge of methodology. How do we approach the study of Africana? A central element of this challenge is the practice of translation, or the work of discovering, recovering and extending the intellectual work of previous centuries and millennia of thinkers.

“The history of Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians connect it with the history of Egypt.”
--Cheikh Anta Diop, Black Nations and Culture

We ended our first class session in Cairo Monday night with this discussion of methodology. The conversation was framed by the opening quote in this post, drawn from the work of the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop. Diop, born in Djourbel Senegal in 1923, is widely recognized as the major intellectual force advancing the work of the study of classical Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. The thrust of Diop's work can be captured in two lines of thought. First, Diop examined the origins of human society, advancing the study of the original contributions of Kemet in the sciences and humanities, among other areas. Second, he traced the cultural, linguistic and intellectual interconnectedness of inner Africa, describing the relationship between groups ranging from the Akan, Dogon and Yoruba of West Africa to the Ki-Kongo and Lingala of Central Africa and the Shillik, Nuer and Dinka of East Africa and Kemetic archetypes and structures.

Diop's work reminds us that the Africans who find themselves in the western hemisphere continue to convene meaning around the grammars and vocabularies of Africana meaning-making, that set of normative assumptions about the world that also informed the lives and work of classical Africa. It is only through beginning to grasp the long-view contribution of Africa to world history that we can hope to find our own voices and define the grounds of which we stand. Such an effort will reveal the necessity to re-think the concept of academic disciplines, going beyond even conversations of inter or multidisciplinarity to reach more essential questions of the purpose, form and function of knowledge. Over the next stages of our journey, our students will continue to explore the imperative, techniques and possibilities of engaging the long-view African intellectual tradition in deep study, sense for sense and semantic translation, discovery and recovery, and the production of a flowering range of methods for making sense of memory in the context of our contemporary moment.

The pyramids at Giza + the Egyptian museum

"I felt that I had a peculiar heritage in the Great Pyramid built...by the enterprising sons of Ham, from which I descended. The blood seemed to flow faster through my veins. I seemed to hear the echo of those illustrious Africans. I seemed to feel the impulse from those stirring characters who sent civilization to Greece...I felt lifted out of the commonplace grandeur of modern times; and, could my voice have reached every African in the world, I would have earnestly addressed him in the language of Hilary Teage--'Retake Your Fame!"
--Edward Wilmot Blyden, In the Great Pyramid of Khufu, July 11, 1866.

Tuesday morning as we entered the Great Pyramid of Khufu, we didn't engrave the word "LIBERIA" at the entrance like the scholar and Pan Africanist Edward Wilmot Blyden did on the occasion of his visit in July 1866. We didn't sing "O Isis and Osiris" from Mozart's The Magic Flute like Paul Robeson did when he stood in Khufu's burial chamber in 1938. We did, however, sing the Alma Mater as we climbed through the narrow passageways and, once inside the chamber, struck a resounding, pitch perfect chorus of Lift Every Voice and Sing, ringing the granite sarcophagus and walls with the words and chords of the Johnson Brothers, James and Rosemond. Howard University has returned to the Nile Valley one year after our historic 2008 study abroad, and we had done so in force.

As we descended into the Pyramid, the rousing conversation that had carried well into the night the previous evening still echoed in my ears. Having survived the long plane ride and emptied ourselves into the awaiting tour bus at the Cairo airport, our work had begun on Monday with a tour of the Mosque of Muhammad Ali Pasha at the Citadel, completed in 1848, a marker for the birth of the modern Egyptian state and a symbol of national pride. The irony was palpable: Here we were, entering our examination of the Nile Valley by touching base with the contemporary reality that modern Egypt is very different than ancient Egypt and at once still fortified and connected to the ancient ones in many lived, imagined and constructed ways.

Driving through the neighborhood of Heliopolis, we took note of the fact that this area had once been called On, and represented the home of the Kemetic symbol of intelligence, writing and memory, Djehuty (called Thoth by the Greeks and the symbol later borrowed and transmuted into Hermes and, later,Mercury). We will become well familiar with Djehuty and his female counterpart Seshat, the patron symbols of all thinkers and writers, over the course of our journey.

Finally, we arrived at the hotel, Le Meridien Pyramids, in the shadow of the largest pyramids in the country--and the world--those of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, as well as the Hor-em-Akhet (Heru of the Horizon), commonly known as the Great Sphinx of Giza. We checked in, showered, ate dinner, and convened our first class session. Our band of 21 was tired but hardy, and we launched into a study abroad mbongi (a ki-kongo word for "room without walls," or "think tank"). Our initial theme--"The Politics of Translation"--proved ideally suited to the task of having us think about why we were in Kemet, where we found ourselves, and why it was so important for us to enter our study with questions of method and process attending our every step.

We began class by reintroducing ourselves to each other: in our intrepid band are Howard students in fields ranging from History and Psychology to Communications, Africana Studies and Theater. We have been accompanied by an administrator from Fisk University and her mother, as well as a scholar from Drexel University engaging in a study of African-American participation in study abroad initiatives. The Fiskite and her mother also happen to be my sister and mother (haha). The Drexel scholar also has deep Howard ties of blood and common purpose. For her eightieth birthday, my family chipped in and subsidized my mother's first trip to Africa. An Alabama Baptist, she had stood in the grand mosque and fell silent before the living witness of the common humanity of the heady mix of languages and cultures that surrounded us. Now she proclaimed herself the official tour "Grandmother," to the laughter of all.

With introductions and reasons for emptying blood and treasure into the cost of the trip re-stated and absorbed, we launched into our work. We immediately began to tease out the challenge of reading classical African history and culture through contemporary lenses, the challenge of translation. The work of discovery and recovery of ideas and experiences from the past is given astonishing force by the monumental work of the people of Kemet. The ancient Egyptians wrote on everything, it seems. Their language, Medew Netcher (literally "Divine Speech" or "Divine Words") was the foundation for the scripts we use today, though these have been reduced exclusively to markers for sound.

As our conversation entered its second hour, we were interrupted by the arrival of a small group of study tour participants from the U.S. led by my friend Manu Ampim, a scholar based in the Bay Area who has travelled to Kemet over twenty times. Later, we saw another colleague, Zizwe Poe, an Associate Professor of History at Lincoln University who is leading a study tour of the Nile Valley as well. I was reminded of the stories I heard from Asa Hilliard and Jacob Carruthers of running into colleagues and friends from the U.S. while examining the history and culture of Kemet. We were connected in so many ways, and Zizwe reminded me that Nnamdi Azikiwe, the First Prime Minister of independent Nigeria and a Lincoln University graduate, had actually started his undergraduate work at Howard under William Leo Hansberry. Azikiwe took the lessons on African history he learned from Hansberry to Lincoln, becoming the first person to offer a course on African history there.

We retired for the night after beginning to exchange the photographs and videos that will become part of this blog, allowing those following us at Howard and around the world to glimpse some of our real time reactions to what we are experiencing.

The next morning, we arose with the sun, grabbed a quick breakfast in the hotel dining room, and embarked for the Great Pyramid plateau of Giza, a bedrock site that looks down on modern Cairo and faces the south, Upper Kemet and Inner Africa. On a clear day--which, because of the pollution generated by twenty million city residents and workers occurs far too infrequently--a visitor to the Great Pyramid can look out over the expanse of desert and glimpse the first "true" pyramidal structures in the world, those constructed by Pharaoh Senefru and the workers of the fourth Kemetic dynasty (circa 2600 b.c.e.) at Meidum and Dashur. This was, needless to say, not a clear day. So we turned inward and journeyed to the burial chamber of the Great Pyramid of Pharaoh Khufu. Khufu, his grandson Khafre (whose pyramid we entered a bit later) and his great grandson Menkaure had their pyramids constructed in an alignment that mirrors the stars in Orion's belt. There are many theories about the plausibility of Kemetic attempts to literally mark the stars by placing pyramids and temples at strategic places up and down the Nile Valley, but there is no denying that these Africans had indeed charted the stars and aligned all of their major building projects with the rhythms of celestial and terrestrial phenomena.

After we left the pyramid of Khafre, we scrutinized a funerary boat belonging to Khufu that has been perfectly preserved in a mini museum just outside the Great Pyramid. This boat, which dates at least to 2550 b.c.e., was recovered from the smallest of seven pits discovered so far by archeological teams. It is very small compared, for example, to the boat sent to Punt (modern day Somalia) by the Pharaoh Hatshepsut in 1480 b.c.e. In a few short days, we will visit Hatshepsut's temple, cut into the cliffs at Deir el-Bahri and site of the stirring photograph of the women members of the group that pioneered the Howard Summer Study Abroad in Kemet experience last year.

After leaving the Giza plateau, we stopped for lunch and to visit a shop for examining and purchasing shenew, the necklace form of the ovals representing the universe that the Kemetians used to represent the names of the Pharaohs. These ovals were called "cartouches" by the French, and are a popular form of contemporary jewelry for visitors to the Nile Valley. Then it was off to the next major site: The Egyptian Museum.

The Egyptian Museum began its life as an idea initiated by the aforementioned Muhammad Ali in 1853. Ali realized that so many treasures from classical Africa were being looted by England, France, Germany, Italy and other European countries that an institution was necessary to restrict this cultural appropriation and keep Kemetic artifacts in the country. Five years later, a Bureau of Antiquities was established and in 1902, the building housing the current Egyptian Museum was completed. It is the largest collection of artifacts from a single country in the world.

We had prepped for our visit to the Egyptian Museum the night before in our initial meeting. We knew what we wanted and needed to see in order to ensure maximum benefit for the four hours we would be spending among the thousands of artifacts; highlights would include the Narmer Palate (the stone document chronicling the unification of Upper and Lower Kemet in 3100 b.c.e.), key statuary of Djoser, Khufu, Hatshepsut, Akhenaten and Nefertiti (and family), Amenhotep III and Tiye and, of course, the treasures of Tutankhamun. The central experience I could not wait to introduce our students to was a trip to the rooms that house several sakhu (mummies), including those of Seti I, Ramses II and Djehutymes III. These bodies have been preserved in such a striking fashion that those looking upon the visages of these long-deceased Pharaohs fall silent in wonder.

Before we entered the museum, we poured a libation outside the museum in respect for the ancestors. We'd performed a similar ritual at the same place the year before. Then, we entered the museum...WHOA! Look at the time! It's 5:45 a.m. here, and my luggage has to be outside my door at 6 a.m. in order to be loaded for the trip to Aswan! Okay, this post has to end. This is only a teaser: When we arrive, we'll pick up from here and continue to chronicle our first several days in Kemet. Today, we're going to visit Saqqara, the site of the first free standing stone building in world history, designed by Imhotep. We're also going to the tombs of Ptah Hotep and Kagemmi (brilliant authors of wisdom texts in the Old Kingdom) and Hwt-Ka-Ptah (house of the soul of Ptah), called "Memphis" by the Greeks and the place that provided the name "Egypt" from the Greek pronunciation "aigyptos." More later...gotta go put that bag outside my door! Stay tuned!

Kom Ombo + Edfu: Healing Body + Mind

Day 8 on the ground dawned with us in motion. We left Aswan and travelled by bus to Kom Ombo and Edfu today, two temples from the late period of Kemetic history and, in the case of Edfu, the largest and best preserved temple in the Nile Valley. We have learned so much over the course of the past week: at Kom Ombo, everyone quickly identified major symbols and figures and easily identified the image of Seshat, the female creator of numbers and measurement, as she supervised the "stretching of the cord," laying the foundation for the temple structure.

I often think of Seshat, the partner of Djehuty and also the keeper of all records in Kemet, as the figure whose energy animated the work of the phalanx of woman librarians of African descent who collected and preserved our history in the twentieth century, from Howard's Dorothy Porter Wesley and Wilberforce's Hallie Quinn Brown to the Schomburg's Jean Blackwell Huston and Tennessee State's Lois Brown Daniel, among so many others.

Kom Ombo, situated near an important trade town that dealt in gold from Nubia in ancient times, was a center for healers known for its double holy of holies, dedicated to the veneration of Sobek and Heru. On the wall beyond the holy of holies is a remarkable series of panels depicting medical advances in Kemet, from the birthing chair to suction devices, scalpels, flasks, knives, tongs, sponges and saw blades, among other tools. We looked at the eye of Heru, inscribed next to the surgical instruments, and Clarice noted that the "Rx" of the apothecary takes its shape and direct inspiration from this earliest of symbols for healing.

We re-boarded the bus and decamped an hour later at Edfu, the imposing temple dedicated to Heru which contains the remarkable narrative rehearsal of the epic Battle of Heru and Setekh (Horus and Set). The temple of Edfu took 180 years to finish and was finally completed under Ptolemy XII, father of Cleopatra VII (the minor figure who seems to attract all the attention in discussions of the "race of the ancient Egyptians" even though she was of no consequence to the long-view stretch of Kemet and was clearly Greek). By now, the heat of the day was upon us: we were set upon by the vendors at Edfu, a particularly aggressive lot who were all the more intent on selling us something given the relative lack of visitors at the time of day we had arrived.

Still, we managed to complete our work, including a reflection on the principal character lesson taught by the struggle between Heru and his uncle: Setekh, who often represents the lesser angels of human nature, cannot be killed. He/it can, however, be controlled by strength of character and purity of purpose. The Yoruba have a phrase, "Iwa Rere" (gentle/good character) and contend that the purpose of being on earth is to work on one's character. In another demonstration of the conceptual cultural unity of Africa, the classical people of Kemet used the narrative of Horus and Set to reinforce this basic message: one should never relent to the temptations brought about by urgings to revenge and to reactionary impulsiveness.

Before I sign off for the night, I want to send love to the high school students in Philadelphia who are completing the tenth "Philadelphia Freedom Summer" as a part of Philadelphia Freedom Schools. These young people hold their end-of-summer research symposium today, and I am saddened at the thought of missing them for the first time in a decade. Their symbols are Djehuty and Ma'at, and they have been models of intellectual excellence and passionate commitment. Like the healers of Kom Ombo and the character-building lessons taught at the Temple of Heru at Edfu, they aim to restore our people to wholeness and health.

Tomorrow we spend the day engaging the largest outdoor museum in the world and the single most imposing collection of artifacts in the valley: Wa'set (The Scepter), known as Thebes to the Greeks. We will start at Ipet Isut, "The most select of places" (Karnak) and end the day at Southern Ipet (Luxor), beginning the day by pouring libation at the White Chapel of Senusret (pictured below), one of the most powerful single structures in the sprawling Ipet Isut complex. We'll have so much to report tomorrow night. Hotep.

Reaching the Higher Ground

“I’m so glad that he let me try it again/Cause my last time on earth I lived a whole world of sin/I’m so glad that I know more than I knew then/Gonna keep on trying/Till I reach the Highest Ground”
---Stevie Wonder, "Higher Ground" (1973)

Dr. Williams and I are sitting in the Sekhmet conference room at the Sonestra St. George Hotel in Luxor, listening to the easy laughter and light conversation of the students as we ease into our final class work day in Kemet. Over the last two days, these young people have written and recorded a mini-documentary of their journey, adding another layer to the long-standing engagement of Howard students with the study of classical Africa. We are both tired but energized by the enthusiasm and unflagging effort of each member of this remarkable band. They have kept on pushing, each question and comment linking them more definitely to the numerous bands of scholars who preceded them. We’ve a story to tell that the blog only scratches the surface of.

This afternoon, we will visit the Luxor Museum, opened in the 1980s and recently refurbished and infused with additional treasures from the endless Kemetic cache. It is an under-visited crown jewel, and we will use the experience to sum up much of what we have seen and discussed to date. The core of the Luxor Museum collection consists of pieces buried for centuries by the priests of Ipet-Isut (“The Most Select of Places,” known to the Greeks as Karnak) to hide them from robbers whose contemporary counterparts have heisted booty that now adorns collections in Berlin, London, Paris, New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. As Dr. Williams wrote earlier, Ipet Isut was the spiritual center for Kemetic life for at least two millennia. When they were discovered in the 1960s, the statuary, stelae and assorted artifacts buried at Ipet Isut were in such pristine states of preservation that, when treated and prepared for display, they seemed to reconstruct Kemet as a living civilization.

At the Luxor Museum, we will be greeted by a massive head of Amenhotep III, Husband of Tiye, Father of Akhenaten and legendary New Kingdom link between the Hatsheptsut-Djehutymes III era and the Akhenaten-Horemheb-Seti-Rameses eras. The first thing you notice about all the Amenhotep III statuary in the Luxor Museum—and there is a lot of it—is the lips. This man was unmistakably African. Four days ago, we visited the “house the Amenhotep III built,” the companion temple complex to Ipet Isut known as Southern Opet (The Place of Seclusion), or Luxor. We lingered at the massive twin statues that front what remains of his morturary temple, two pieces known as “The Colossi of Memnon” in a gesture toward the Greek king made famous in the Iliad, five centuries later.

We will wind around the various pieces of limestone, pink and black granite, and malachite, the pristine glyphs, astonishing detail and serene visages pulling us into deeper and deeper reflection on the many places we have visited in the last two weeks. These students have drilled into a deep well of Classical Africana, nestled along the Nile, and mined gems that they have prepared over the last several days to present on this website in the next days and weeks.

As with the story of Hatshepsut, we have aspired to strengthen that which has been strong and to do right by the great legacy we have inherited. Though she was schemed against by the forces of her day, this great Per Uah managed to extend the authority of Kemet as a diplomat and visionary, in the tradition of her predecessors and as the custodian of the legacy of her ancestors. As we stood at her morturary temple, we reflected on what she wrote on her Tekken (Obelisk) at Ipet Isut:

All foreign lands are my subjects, He placed my border at the limits of heaven. What Aten encircles labors for me. He gave it to him who came from him. Knowing I would rule it for him. I am his daughter in very truth, Who serves him who knows what he ordains. My reward from my father is life-stability-rule. On the Horus throne of all the living, eternally like Re.

When we enter the sakhu (mummy) room at the Luxor Museum, we will see Ahmose, laying there, with the golden fly-shaped amulets signifying the battle citations awarded his Mother, the Theban Queen Tetisheri: HIS MOTHER!!—for her helping to lead Kemet’s armies against invaders. These amulets lie under glass a few feet from Ahmose and next to his own battle dagger. Ahmose, a petit man who had commanded the respect and admiration of first his troops, then a nation. Ahmose, whose Black skin and African features are indistinguishable from those we viewed when looking down on Seti I and the Djehutymeses in the Cairo Museum.

We will see statues of Horemheb, the once-general under Tutankhamun who was considered the first legitimate Per Uah since Amenhotep III and who rose to lead Kemet into the transition between the 18th and 19th Dynasties and the era of Ramseses. Three days ago, we visited Horemheb’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings, as well as that of Tawosret, mother of Seti I and the Ramses line, a Per Uah in her own right before being succeeded by Setnakht. As we scrutinized these tombs in the Valley, the guides allowed us the freedom to comment on the various texts inscribed therein: The Book of Days and The Book of Nights; The Book of the Earth, The Litanies of Re and The book of Amduat. They re-christened us “Egyptian Negroes,” to hearty laughter all around that rang the limestone shafts cut deep in the earth. Like the nondescript piano movers, train station wayfarers and pedestrians described by Ralph Ellison in his essay The Little Man at Cheraw Station, these guards know more about the contents of the tombs than many who profess to be experts. As African-Americans, we have learned to meet people in our common humanity and take them at their lived experience rather than at the social rank or status that is often used to separate person from person. Because of this, we have been afforded particular warmth everywhere we have sojourned so far.

At the Luxor Museum we will see statues of Seti I, master builder and the moving force behind the temple he built at Abydos, described according to David O’Connor as being set “in the province which he loved, his heart’s desire ever since he had been on earth, the sacred soil of Wennefer (Osiris)” At Abydos two days ago, we examined the site with the richest untapped potential to yield traces that connect all periods of the Kemetic state. The area served as the burial site for the first rulers of Kemet (including Narmer the Unifier) and was venerated since at least 2,000 b.c.e. as the burial place of Wosir (Osiris). It is almost entirely un-excavated, and most of its temples and tombs were razed millennia ago so their materials could be re-used for other structures. Visitors to Abydos come to walk, meditate and absorb the unparalleled carvings in the astonishing temple of Seti I, completed by his son, Ramses II during the 19th Dynasty. The official name of the temple is The Noble Mansion of Millions of Years of the King Men-Ma’at-Ra who Rests in Abydos.

As significant as Abydos is, however, many tourists do not visit. According to the tour guides, Abydos is not on the standard tour package: It lies three hours from Luxor by bus. In visiting there, as well as Memphis and the Tombs of the Nobles in both Aswan and Deir el Medina, we have followed a generation of African-American tours of Kemet that were built by women and men who knew their importance to the intellectual genealogy of the Nile Valley, of African people, and of humanity.

Due to the focused and informed nature of our discussions as we visit the sites, other tour groups have been pausing to take note of how much our group knows about each place; the temple and tomb guards have been referring to us as “professors”; African-American tourists in the hotels have come up to us to ask how we have acquired so much information, and a couple from Eritrea brought her teenaged sons to class yesterday to exchange experiences. When we visited Dendera after leaving Abydos, we were able to discuss the particulars of Kemetic notions of time and space. The classical Africans gave the world the calendar it still uses; the concept of the 365 day year, the 24 hour day and the progression of the constellations in the star-strewn sky, inscribed in the famous "Dendera Zodiac." Our tour guide has been duly impressed with the level of hard work and preparation we have undertaken. She can, of course,only glimpse the passion that lies behind that type of effort.

Ours is a passion born of a sense of urgency. The world changes, but that which can be recovered of human memory that can save us from making the same mistakes of the past must be retrieved. Stevie Wonder had a premonition of his demise near his 23rd birthday and awoke from the vision to write and record"Higher Ground" in three hours in May, 1973. Three months later, he was in a coma because of an automobile accident. His road manager and friend, Ira Tucker, Jr., sat by his bedside as his vital signs ebbed. Finally, Tucker "got right down in his ear and sang 'Higher Ground." As he sang, Wonder's fingers, resting on Tucker's arm, started moving in time with the song. Tucker remembers saying "Yeah! This dude's gonna make it!"

I think of the fact that the lyrics of "Higher Ground" speak to the fact that our lives do not begin with our physical births, but rather have access to all the memories that previous lives provide to be retrieved. As we restore our memories, we give ourselves the means for our salvation, no matter what immediate tragedies or crises we encounter. Moment by moment, we have watched Ernest, Angi, Brittani, Sawdayah, Miriah, Jazelle, Shacrai, Clarice, Marcy, Nijeul, Dana, Havian, Robert and Jalena move as individuals and in concert to reach the highest ground. As Dana, Toria, Shelley, Gussie, Maria, Brittany my mother and I have worked alongside them, learning every moment of the way. I'm so glad that we have been able to do this again. Our last time here we did it well. Next time, should we be allowed, we will do it differently and differently better. For now, as we begin to reflect on our journey, we stand firmly on the highest ground.

Returning "home" from Kemet: A Blue(s) mood

We are back in Heliopolis, site of the ancient city of On, ten minutes from Cairo International Airport. Tomorrow morning, we return to New York and to our lives and studies with renewed spirits, reshaped visions and the foresight born from measured contemplation of where we have been. Still, the moment is not without its bittersweet undertones, its mood indigo. Last night in Luxor, we convened around the dinner table to reflect on our two weeks together.

A breeze blew in from the Nile, drying the tears that flowed, mingling with voices offering gratitude and determination. Many evoked the names of family and friends who raised money to subsidize their voyage, vowing to repay the investment with detailed descriptions and the lessons learned from the places they’d studied. Ernest, with his trademark coolness, thanked us all for stretching him. Angi observed that she sat in a place that her father has dreamt of visiting his entire life. Brittani evoked the Biblical passage that the race (in this case to recover our past and use it to rebuild our present and future) is not to the swift or strong, but to they that endureth to the end.

When we left the U.S. two weeks ago, the country was just entering the latest denoument of fatigue that accompanies supercharged stories of racial strife. The dying embers of the the latest contretemps, this one involving the “intellectual entrepreneur” Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., offers a useful example of what we must confront and what must not distract us as scholars of African descent. As Glenn Loury noted in the New York Times, Gates could have used his arrest and the media spotlight it afforded him to focus the country on the many instances when men and women of African descent have found themselves without the ability to defend themselves from legalized injustice, as well as on the many who languish behind bars wrongly or with sentences far more severe than their alleged offenses. Instead, Gates chose to highlight himself and move quickly to the rhetoric of forgiveness and reconciliation. In other words, he made another futile attempt to entertain the question that W.E.B. DuBois offered “nary a word” in response to a century ago, “How does it feel to be a problem?”

Race is a social reality in today’s global society. It is also a recent world historical phenomenon, and one that must ultimately be discarded if humanity is to develop beyond our fears and live our dreams as more than a handful of select individuals scattered in webs of privilege and sheltered isolation. The reality of Kemet and classical Africa removes the consideration of race as the lens through which those who study it view the world and approach social problems. Examining the ways that these Africans thought about themselves and their reality has the potential to re-attach us, first as Africans and ultimately as human beings, to the rich trove of ideas about self and society, world and cosmos that began with the dawn of organized thought and continues, unbroken, in the traces of the intellectual genealogy of Africana.

Last week, by examining in line by line fashion The Memphite Theology, our study tour group regained a point of view from the Kemetic wisdom literature on the relationship between matter and sentience, and considered the world’s most influential culture’s explanation of how to know the world we live in while contemplating that world’s essence. By tracing out the expression of this understanding at every stop we have made, culminating in this return to the ancient city of On, we have begun to understand the usefulness of discarding smallish, unhelpful frameworks for thinking about what is and what can be. Race becomes a puny thing, an ugly glitch in the long line of the best of what human beings have imagined.

Jacob Carruthers summarizes the idea of God in the Memphite Theology and the Kemetic worldview, noting that, for the Egyptians, God was the interaction of the fundamental essence of the eternal elements of all that is, described in their texts as four principles: Solvency [Nenew/Nenewt], “the primeval condition and substance of creation which has neither form nor stability”; Infinity in time and space [Hehew/Hehewt]; Darkness [Kekew/Kekewt], or the unicity of leveling perception; and endless, directionless Movement, hidden but constantly present[Tenemw/Tenemwt or, in many texts, Imun/Imunet].

As these eternal elements interacted, they expressed themselves in an act of ordered improvisation, a Sep Tepy (“first occasion”) moment of creation signified by the Netcher (expression of the Divine) Ptah. The Kemetians described this moment as “Medu,” or “speech,” the first word. Subsequently, Carruthers goes on to note, reality becomes an unending progression of the word, a genealogy of speeches that stretches from timeless infinity through now and the future, and includes the moment of thought that forms each moment in the human being. It attended the articulation of the elements out of which humans were said to have formed: Earth (Geb), Sky (Nut), Air (Shu) and Moisture (Tefnut). It then brought about the comingling of these elements as the expression of the four pairs of ancestors to human beings: Wosir (Osiris), Auset (Isis), Setekh (Set) and Nebhet (Nepthys). These were simply names for forces that have always existed but which always reveal themselves to the Egyptians’ limited perception in ways that were best managed by imagining and giving name to that which they could not see.

The Egyptians did not attempt to imagine that the interaction of these principles was not, in fact, the order of things in reality. In naming order Ma’at, in fact, they expressed a sentiment born from scientific observation that everything that is, always has been, and resolves itself ultimately in harmony, from the order of the stars to the rising and setting of the sun and the inundation of the Nile and the beating of the heart. For the Kemetic thinker, only our memory of witnessing and experiencing this ever-resolving harmony (provided by devices of writing and measuring gifted to humanity through the ideas of Djehuty and Seshat) is limited, and then only by the space we are willing to give our recorded memory and our creative intelligence, themselves issue of the self-same eternal principles.

Is this intellectual approach really different than the science that physicists evoke to discuss “string theory?” Does it differ qualitatively from the children that the Memphite Theology gave birth to, from the Abrahammic faith traditions to the various improvisational expressions of Africana deep thought, from Vodun, Cadomble or Santeria to the Africanized Protestantisms of Shango (Shouter) Baptists, Pentacostals or good old “shoutin’ Baptists?”. Of course not. The Kemetians did not distinguish between science, technology and spirituality, between sacred and secular, in any sense we would recognize today. Their faith was born from steady, patient observation: They believed, in the words of the 16th century African scholar from the great mosque of Timbuktu, Ahmed Baba, “in God and Science.”

But now, faced with a world that struggles to free itself from the maddening recent habit of reducing people to “races,” how do we capture in language this sense of the interconnectedness of all things? Western scholars have often evoked the alphabet as a progression in the human capacity to articulate ideas, noting that using symbols exclusively for sound (as distinct from using them for both sounds and ideas) frees the mind to recombine thoughts in endless variation. The fact that the modern alphabet is derived largely from Kemetic Medew Netcher notwithstanding, the Egyptians created their inscription system in an attempt to produce a method for capturing ideas, sights, sounds—even smells and tastes—in a coding process that hovered somewhere between the abstract and the concrete.

In an unbroken genealogy, African people have maintained these improvisational approaches to speech, apprehending the unknowable nature of the Sep Tepy but generating technique after technique for capturing more of it than mere words can achieve: In other words, Africana inscription systems consistently free “speech” from the straightjacket of word/script exclusivity. From the parent Medew Netcher of classical Africa, we see the danced reinscription of the orbit patterns of the stars Sirius and Sirius-B of the Dogon, who claim to have migrated with this knowledge to West Africa from the East; we observe the varying conceptual inscriptions of the Akan, collapsed into Adinkra symbols of cloth and metal and ink and bourne according to their collective memory along a similar migration arc; we note the ground markings of the Ki-Kongo Cosmograph, forming the perpetual cycle and spiral of reality whose movement traces the “four moments of the sun” in identical fashion to the Kemetic concepts of Kheper, Ra and Atum.

And, our memory re-attached by the memory of Djehuty and the measurements and records of Seshat, we trace anew the unbroken genealogy of these Africana improvisational speeches, Medew forced into ships and emptied living and whole into the Western hemisphere, reconvening itself and blending and reblending its systems of word, sound, sign, smell and taste, speaking yet again in the Sep Tepy that links classical Africa to the contemporary African world.

We may usefully refer to an essential element of these speeches as the “Blue Note,” that conduit of apprehension and expression that, like its ancestor Medew Netcher, enters the senses as a concrete expression and frees the mind and spirit to join as one, offering the ability to Sedjem, or “hear,” the highest form of intelligence for the Egyptians, so important that they inscribed the admonition to hear on the wall enclosing the double holy of holies at the late period Kemetic center for healers, Kom Ombo.

What is the best-known conduit of the Blue Note, the Blues, except a perpetually resolving expression of Ma’at? How different is the speech of the word-less Blue Note that Louis Armstrong sends forth for the three and a half minutes of West End Blues from the speeches of Khun Inpu in the Kemetic narrative of The Nine Petitions of the Farmer Whose Speech Is Good? Is the in-between the pentatonic scale wail of the Ki-Kongo/Bambara descended New Orleanian not improvising the original speech of Ptah within the perpetually resolving harmony of Ma’at, and in so doing allowing us to release our frustrations, hopes and determination into the expectation that, like Inpu before the magistrates and Per Uah, we shall find that which is true? When Inpu threatens to evoke the Netcher Inpu (Annubis) as the final arbiter of right and wrong, thereby bringing the corrupt officials to account before the scales of Ma’at, we can see Louis Armstrong sweating and smiling, handkerchief in hand, slicing through the subterfuge of minstrelsy with a trumpet sound that could, in the words of Ossie Davis, “kill a man.”

When Martin King, the night before his death, envisions the promised land, is this not an expression of the apprehension of Ma’at? “I Have a Dream,” far from an exercise in hopeful expectation of a failing system of Western “democracy,” becomes an improvisational re-inscription of Africana expectations of the resolution of dissonances into harmony when viewed through the lens of the judgment scenes we have traced in the tombs of Horemheb and Ramses IX, and read in the texts that adorn the walls of Abydos.

The western framework cannot hold such concepts. It is too ill-constructed, too immature. Ralph Ellison’s genius descriptions of the Blues overflow the modest and ill-equipped vessel of American exceptionalism into which he pours them, and the lineage of Homer, Hesiod, Dante, Shakespeare, Hawthorne and Thoreau which feed that vessel. But the Blues are at home with Ma’at, in vertical conversations with the classical genealogy and in horizontal conversations with its varied and various relatives across the African world. Like the main character in the Kemetic story of the “shipwrecked sailor,” the Blue Note points the way home, and home, Thomas Hardy’s admonition from the sidelines notwithstanding, is a place to which you can always return. Just as the Per Uah told the wayward Sinhue to “return to the Black Land (Kemet): It’s the place where you came into existence,” so the Blues reminds us of a place that exists beyond physical time and space and yet suffuses the time and space of any place that we find ourselves. It is speech writ large, like Medu Netcher.

One can imagine the Blues playing as one enters the sacred chambers at the temple of Seti I at Abydos. The Blue Note could reconcile the tender scenes of Seti adjusting the rainments of the Netchers, from the crown of Wosir to the garments of Auset. As Earth, Wind and Fire sang to us to “tell the story/morning glory/all about the Serpentine Fire,” it seems as if the Kemetic people took the idea of inscribing spiritual transcendence to heart.

As challenged by long-term memory loss as its author may be, nevertheless the Blues-tinged lines and sounds of 50 Cent’s “Many Men" is still much better equipped than Thucydides or Patton to help us understand the mood and mind of Ramses II, depicted in the temple at Abu Simbel astride his steed and preparing to plunge his Set battle division into the heart of the Hittite army.

"Many men/wish death upon me/Blood in my eye dawg and I can't see/I'm trying to be what I'm destined to be/And [Hittites] trying to take my life away/I put a hole in a [Hittite] for messing with me/My back on the wall/now you goin' to see/Better watch how you talk/when you talk about me/Cause I'll come and take your life away."

It is a Blues moment, infused with part Stagolee, part Muddy Waters channeling Jesus Christ in the temple. In the temple built next door for his wife, Nefertari, a simple glance at the adoring Ramses offering lotus flowers and incense to his wife is not enough: This is not Romeo and Juliet, or Brad and Angelina. Looking above Nefertari's head, one translates the glyph “Hemetch,” not semantically as “wife” in English, German, Spanish or French, but literally as “well of water.” If there is confusion to what water means to a people surrounded by desert, or to a Black Man, one simply has to reference the great speech of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, the nearly eight minute “I Miss You.” Clearly, these are African people, these Egyptians.

Ausar battles his brother Setekh. Ausar is murdered, his body cut into pieces in some versions of the story and strewn in the Nile. Auset is alerted to the deed and, with her sister NebHet, retrieves all the pieces of her husband's body except the phallus, which is ultimately replaced with a proxy that allows her to impregnate herself with Ausar's seed and give birth to Heru. How many Egyptologists have linked this narrative to writers from Sophocles to Freud?

Perhaps the virtuoso performance of Son House’s Death Letter by the Blues emperess Cassandra Wilson before a live audience in New York City for the Great Night in Harlem album would, in linking indelibly to the unbroken genealogy of Africana medew, remove these ill-considered gestures. Riding the groove convened with congas, electric bass and guitar, she pulls tight the threads of lyric and tone she has woven through the ears and souls of the listening participants, enveloping the audience and every subsequent listener in a grand and irresistible call and response. It is medew, reaching a level of Ancestral communion that flows through her smoky contralto and helps us understand what Auset must have felt when she heard the news, and what she did in its wake:

"I got a letter this morning/how do you reckon it read/it said “hurry hurry, on account of the man you love is dead/got a letter this morning/how do you reckon it read?/It said “hurry hurry, the man you love is dead”…

"I packed up my suitcase/took off down the road/when I got there/he was lying on the coolin' board/Packed up my suitcase/took off down the road.../when I got there/he was lying on the coolin' board."

“Looked like it was 10,000 people/standing round the burial ground/I didn’t know I loved him/Till they layed him down/Look like it was 10,000 people/standing round the burial ground/Lord, I didn’t know that I loved him/until they layed my daddy down…

“You know I got up this morning/right about the break of day/I was hugging the pillow/Where he used to lay/I got up two in the morning/well, right at the break of day/I was hugging the pillow/where he used to lay…”

“Everybody hush!/Thought I heard him call my name/Wasn’t loud/it was so sweet and plain…/so sweet…./hush…/everybody hush…/I heard him call out my name…”

And what of the child born of that Blues moment of pain, triumph and the restoration of Ma'at? The story of Heru is not, as gestured toward by the German Egyptologist Jan Assman, a narrative that might be compared as a revenge fantasy in some fashion to Hamlet. Not if you refocus the speech as an antecedent to the sentiment expressed by Clarence Carter in “Patches.” One can hear Auset telling her son that she is counting on him “to pull this family through/my son, it’s all up to you.” Like the Blues, the narratives of Kemet are expressions of an understanding that transcends the limiting narratives of tragedy, comedy or the genre divisions of internal and external conflict. They are reminders that every challenge comes with the tools through which to meet and transcend it. And, we must remember, beyond the challenges lies the reassuring presence of Ma’at.

(sources: one | two | three | four | five | six)

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Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts & Baldwin's Nigger: "It is not a racial problem. It's a problem of whether or not you're willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it ... White is not a color, it's a attitude" / James Baldwin and Dick Gregory {film}

2015-10-04T09:10:00.000-04:00

In the film "Baldwin's Nigger," (available free below) James Baldwin and Dick Gregory talk about the black experience in America and relate it to that of the Caribbean in Great Britain. Filmed at the West Indian Student Center of London in 1968 by Horace Ove, a British filmmaker, painter and writer and one of the leading black independent film-makers to emerge in Britain since the post-war period.

Before we get to that though I'd like to share a quick thought. In a recent interview with Tavis Smiley about her book "Harlem Is Nowhere", Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts discusses the essay by the modernist writer Ralph Ellison that inspired the title of her book:

"Harlem is the scene and symbol of the Negro's perpetual alienation in the land of his birth."
-Ralph Ellison, "Harlem Is Nowhere" 1948

Tavis also challenges her to respond to another quote in her book, this one from the great diplomat and civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson:

"The question naturally arises, 'Are the Negroes going to be able to hold Harlem?' If they have been steadily driven northward for the past hundred years and out of less desirable sections, can they hold this choice bit of Manhattan Island? It is hardly probable that Negroes will hold Harlem indefinitely, but when they are forced out it will not be for the same reasons that forced them out of former quarters in New York City. The situation is entirely different and without precedent. When colored people do leave Harlem, their homes, their churches, their investments and their businesses, it will be because the land has become so valuable they can no longer afford to live on it. But the date of another move northward is very far in the future."
-James Weldon Johnson, 1925

When Tavis asks her, "is there hope for Harlem," she places it in the possession of those in Harlem who "hold the memory of this place and the power of what it's meant for so many generations." Unfortunately, Tavis never gets her into discussing the role that the black upper-middle class is playing in stealing back Harlem now that "the land has become so valuable [the black lower class] can no longer afford to live on it." The failure to address that question in a nationally televised discussion on Harlem in 2011 is super sad, especially in light of other conversations on blackness and class divides in the Obama era. I'm also reminded of the movie trailer for the documentary "The Atlanta Way," a film that proposes to analyze the gentrification of Atlanta. In interviews with black developers, their opaque statements on "development" seem purposefully unclear in order to please any listener, and they never face the question of displacement straight up. Unfortunately, there too, at least in the trailer, white skinned folks are the only ones portrayed as gentrifiers, while the black developers' comments seem to be placed on the same side -- in intention -- as the black residents of the government project housing complexes whose complaints center mainly around not being "given" enough to motivate them to want to care for their community. While the idea of black folk in the projects expecting to be given anything is problematic, the question remains, whose side are these black developers on? Without the type of prescience of a James Weldon Johnson -- or, as we'll see below, a James Baldwin -- it's hard to answer that question.

And perhaps that is ultimately why Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is unable (yet?) to answer these questions coherently -- she's still very young for a writer getting so much attention, and maybe is still setting her feet into memory. Here's how The New York Times, which by no means do I look to for instruction, described her book:

/////"It reads, in fact, as if Ms. Rhodes-Pitts had taken W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Souls of Black Folk” and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and spliced them together and remixed them, adding bass, Auto-Tuned vocals, acoustic breaks, samples (street sounds, newsreel snippets, her own whispered confessions) and had rapped over the whole flickering collage. It makes a startling and alive sound, one you cock your head at an angle to hear. At the end you may decide, as I did, that this ambitious racket is somewhat hollow: the book never coheres or locates its own beating heart. But Ms. Rhodes-Pitts’s is a voice you’ll want to hear again, to recapture the scratchy buzz she’s put into your head."/////

Unfortunately, as we discussed here with the film "Night Catches Us" (here and here), the children of the crack generation have an unfair burden placed on them so that when they speak, regardless of their status as a post-apocalyptic generation, they are looked to as if they inherited an uninterrupted, multi-generational continuum of black thought and experience, when in fact that is just no longer true.

Sure every generation of black folk has endured its share of struggle in and since slavery, but in many ways we are again in a reconstruction period in America, with crack cocaine being such a nuclear-like experience for the black family and community that it could be looked at as a condensed sequel to the slavery "event." We could also tangent this conversation into examples of continuum longer than the black American up until crack, but the only point I'm making by evoking that concept is to illustrate that a thing such as a multi-generational continuum exists and that crack was a massive interruption unlike any black folks had seen since slavery.

The thing I find most interesting about apocalyptic events is the varying choices that are made by those who experience them, something Cedric Robinson has already traced from the colonial period to the civil rights era. For us though, crack is in many ways the end-cap on a series of continuously linked, post-slavery intergenerational resistance, from the Harlem renaissance, civil rights movement, black power movement, black arts movement, to the Black Panther Party movement -- a legacy demonstrating incredible intergenerational stamina. Equally condensed temporally -- fast causes generate fast effects -- hip-hop blossoms and becomes the new blues, new soul and new rock. Up until then, black (aka American) music had been mainly a continuous evolution from the spirituals and the blues, with hip-hop it's sort of reborn and, while still present, the memory is distant in scratches, remixes and samples. The New York Times perspective is only worth something to me because it interestingly evokes that remixing practice to describe the style of Rhodes-Pitts; the way we chose to use technology to rebel (shout out to Waxpoetics mag for featuring Juan Atkins recently) and bring our distant memory of our past into the future -- sampling wasn't big in hip-hop in the late 70s and early 80s, but it got huge in the heart of the crack era (late 80s and early 90s). But as we've seen in the early 2000s, sampling can only go so far toward keeping memory alive, bloggers have popularized an entire sub-movement to retrieve the original songs that hip-hop artists take samples from to create their albums. People have decided, often against the behest of producers not wanting to reveal their magic, that they need to hear more than just the sample to really know.

As historian Donna Murch pointed out at a recent "Night Catches Us" screening at Harlem's Maysles storefront theatre, the Black Panthers were such a perfect reflection of the black community that they were the epitome of inheritors of the torch of black struggle, demonstrating what could be done with such a rich intellectual and political inheritance, and their destruction serving as a micro example of the destruction of black community when the crack event occurred and a more or less continuous chain was bombed into the fucking ground (like me, Murch is extremely interested in the work of Gary Webb and investigating the weaponization of crack cocaine and how it ties to the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan presidency).

Therefore, because our art is in many ways relatively elementary, our stories often lack the long view that we noted links Ayi Kwei Armah and Lauryn Hill. I think what Leonardo da Vinci was saying when he said, "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" was that when you sense clearly and see clearly, especially temporally, you realize your responsibility to speak clearly. That's why I think Michael Jackson obsessed over a pose and why Armah advises one to be conscious of the delicate process of awakening. Malcolm X called it, "making it plain." The photographer Jamel Shabazz's work is revolutionary in it's clear, simple premise -- help us remember what we looked like in "A Time Before Crack".

Our elementary position as a post-apocalyptic generation sometimes pressures us to speak before we're prepared to speak simply. Though an excellent worker, perhaps Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, like Tanya Hamilton and many of us, is simply not yet ready to be prescient and we should accept that. Like the conclusions reached with "Night Catches Us," it leaves us open to accepting both the beauty and limitations of the work and worker, while clear about what the essence of next evolution should contain. And really, if we contemplate it seriously across time and space, it's just essences that we're concerned about -- memory helps us maintain them (better). But perhaps Lauryn Hill's crucifixion for abandoning "the game" makes more sense when we see it in that light. Only the most exceptional arise from an apocalypse with a long memory in tact and immediately accessible, or even the desire to restore a long memory plagued by amnesia. For those of us, like Rhodes, who are brave enough to try, the increased value of the pre-crack philosophers of black thought is revealed once again. If Rhodes-Pitts, who I give props to, gives us a valuable but foggy, remixed vision of those who "hold the memory" of Harlem through the eyes of a transplanted, not-yet-prescient writer, here James Baldwin gives us sophisticated simplicity, as a member of a generation that more easily inherited an uninterrupted continuum of black thought and experience.

Also on liberatormag.com: 1) The dilemma of the metaphorical mulatto / White privilege; 2) Blacks Heading South, Leaving The City; 3) If BET were to design a city it would be Atlanta

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Originally Posted 3/21/2011

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Will the Real Pan-Africanists Please Stand-Up?

2015-10-04T08:40:00.000-04:00

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

Will the Real Pan-Africanists Please Stand-Up?
by Austin Thompson

Senegal's president Abdoulaye Wade calls him self a Pan-Africanist. He offered to give land to Haitians who lost their homes in the recent earth quake. In April, he will unveil a new statue dedicated to what he calls the "African Renaissance". However, Wade's policies of neo-liberal privatization, demagoguery against his political opponents and his outrageous attempts to win the favor of foreign investors and Western presidents are the polar opposite of what revolutionary leaders discussed at the 6th Pan-African Congress, when the last wave of African liberation movements were struggling against neo-colonialism. Wade, and the other presidents who share similarly right-wing visions for Africa, are impotent against ramped corruption and extreme ethnic and religious violence happening in Africa today. The major reason why is that their visions of Pan-Africanism or African Renaissance draw their strength from the institutional foundations of neo-colonialism.

During European colonialism, traditional or customary ethnic and religious identities were politically exaggerated by racists to legitimize their own dominance in Africa. Colonizers realized early on that by capitalizing on the cultural and historical Native Authorities of rural Africa they could put a local face on external domination and pit traditional factions against one another. This system of indirect rule thrived in an atmosphere of "divide and conquer" where ruthless competition between identities for a piece of the pie kept colonialism in tact. Even after the European powers, exhausted by World War II, decided to grant political independence to their colonies, many African countries chose to maintain the same colonial-type institutions that politicized ethnic and religious differences.

Today, ethnic and religious groups in rural Africa desperately jostle for political authority or economic gains from mineral riches, fertile lands, and increasingly scarce water resources. Far from the romanticized conceptions of African Renaissance with aborigines beating tom-toms, dancing half-naked, and eating mangos, over half of rural Africa is consumed by ruthless competitions between extremely poor people organizing on essentialist conceptions of their identities. Armed with automatic machine guns, machetes, or voting ballots these groups fight to protect the interests of the friends who worship as they worship or the distant cousins who can trace their bio-cultural origins to a common ancestor, all while working to eliminate competitors. These remarkably static conceptions of identity are not natural but the result of very specific political cultures that emerged as a result of Western social engineering.

The current un-governability and divisiveness of much of rural Africa plays directly into the hands of Western economic powers who take more than their fair share of Africa's wealth. On the one hand, the historical fragmentation of the post-colonial state along ethnic or religious lines has prevented the emergence of national, broad-based political and social movements that can demand fast-track redistribution of lands and mineral wealth to the countryside. As we have seen in the unfolding "Bolivarian Revolution" in Latin America, the U.S. government believes that the ultimate challenge to domination of its "own backyard" is national democratic and popular alliances organized around distributional rather than nativist political cultures.

More importantly, in keeping with classical liberal economics, imperialists (governments who actively support or practice the act of imperialism) benefit from a central government that is too weak to regulate multinational corporations in remote areas where the raw mineral resources being extracted or to ensure the revenues from the resources are being taxed to fund public services. A central African government that is constantly threatened by ego-tripping rebels scrambling for power or working to satisfy the interests of religious brotherhoods is either an enthusiastic customer for military weapons sales or potentially dependent on aid.

There were radical nationalists like Julius Nyere, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral and Samora Machel who explicitly attempted to de-legitimize Native Authority and unite the most oppressed sectors of their countries under national liberation movements for social and economic justice. These leaders originally mobilized heterogeneous movements in solidarity that could dismantle the institutions of colonial rule and isolate traditional African elites who empowered them. Furthermore, they advocated the direct takeover of the commanding heights of the economy including the technologies responsible for the extraction of strategic natural resources and agricultural production -- a step taken to ensure as broad a program of poverty eradication as possible.

The combination of these two events resulted in direct confrontations with the combined forces of Western military might and economic isolation but also internal opposition from conservative Native Authorities. After the implosion of the Soviet Union and de-radicalization of Communist China these rebellious African regimes lost their main sources of technical and financial assistance.

Despite their eventual defeat, radical nationalists in Africa did leave behind one major victory -- national political identity. For example, Tanzania is among the few territorially large African countries that has not seen essentialist identity politics spill-over into extreme violent conflict. Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani has spoken about the nationalist legacy of Julius Nyere in Tanzania pointing out, "the success of Tanzania as a nation that is getting it right on the continent is because the nation's erstwhile leader, Julius Nyerere, during his tenure dismantled the customary law, thereby making everyone a Tanzanian citizen."

Radical nationalism sought to do the very difficult task of changing rural dwellers perceptions about political legitimacy.

The demonization of African leaders who supported "left-wing" political views and policies that emphasized economic sovereignty and sweeping agrarian transformation of society always takes conversations outside of the context of contemporary African politics, where genocide and religious fundamentalism exist side-by-side with crippling social injustices. And when discussing genocide and religious fundamentalism, the exact inverse is true. Commentary on violent ethnic or religious factions are taken out of the context of a documented imperialist strategy of neutralizing any political movement that sought to unite citizens under bold agendas for radical social change.

I am involved with the Pan-African Youth Summit 2010 in Dakar that is trying to organize a new coalition of grassroots "left" organizations united in the reconstruction of a legitimate Pan-African movement. The term "left" is necessary in this case to distinguish between Pan-Africanists who believe the driving force of progressive change is the most oppressed and exploited members of society, from those who believe traditional elites and politicians can deliver that change. Without the emergence of broad-based popular alliances organized around agrarian reform and a government that can provide widespread social protections, Africa will likely continue to have scenes of discriminate carnage and extreme poverty. I hope that my African friends and allies will answer the challenge. Africa is in need of a revolution, not a renaissance.

REFERENCES
1. Mahmood Mamdani. Citizen and Subject- Chapter Eight Conclusion: Linking the Urban and the Rural

2. Sam Moyo and Paris Yoros. The Resurgence of Radical Nationalism in the South Atlantic

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"Towards the End of Hip-Hop" / Jeff Chang exclusive interview with The Liberator Magazine

2015-10-04T08:20:00.001-04:00

"Generations are fiction. The act of determining a group of people by imposing a beginning and ending date around them is a way to impose a narrative. They are interesting and necessary fictions because they allow claims to be staked around ideas. But generations are fictions nonetheless, often created simply to suit the needs of demographers, journalists, futurists and marketers."
-Jeff Chang, "Cant Stop Wont Stop"

Ever notice how much hip-hop means to some folks? Not just the folks that should be attached to the genre (i.e. the groundbreakers and their righteous apprentices). No--what is termed "hip-hop" has become ambiguous, all-encompassing and inclusive enough to interest swarms of followers. Hip-hop and its associates have created a history, culture and experience that are devoid of any significant connection to the outside world.

And hip-hop becomes the immaculately conceived genre, begetting itself, for itself, by itself. It may appear that all has been said and done that can possibly be said and done in regard to hip-hop. Cultivated out of very real circumstances, the genre has come quite close to being a farce. While hip-hop appears to have reached its zenith--according to the American Dream formula--the hollow center of what was once an intense sociopolitical force is heard and felt by pioneers and devotees alike. So the questions become: what is hip-hop and how did it lead us here? Who is to blame for this complicated musical form, which ultimately requires participants to sell their qualms and inhibitions for a false sense of achievement?

In "Can't Stop Won't Stop," hip-hop journalist Jeff Chang provides close to 500 pages of an intense textual analysis, exposing hip-hop for what it is: an extension of the people who developed and culturally-informed the genre itself. Among other things, Jeff Chang does what a lot of so-called hip-hop journalists fail to do; he historicizes hip-hop, contextualizing the social and political circumstances of the United States, Jamaica and Columbia (among other places) which ultimately influenced the cultural experiences of hip-hop's foreparents. More importantly, Chang provides the historical foundation necessary to fairly critique hip-hop's industry and musicians.

Unabashedly, the text exposes the bad and ugly elements of the 1960s and 1970s which would ultimately produce some good: a revolutionary art form. Beginning with "Necropolis: The Bronx and the Politics of Abandonment," Chang examines the economy of the South Bronx and the overt racism which caused not only "White Flight" but also created the atmosphere that would give birth to hip-hop. Chang goes on to explore the deep roots of hip-hop in Jamaica, investigating the role of seldom-mentioned but highly influential musicians like Lee "Scratch" Perry.

More than anything else, Chang discusses the aspects of hip-hop which connect the genre to its pioneers: the English and Spanish-speaking descendants of Africa. While this might seem like a moot point, the re-creation of hip-hop has subsequently divorced the art form from any distinct cultural origin. However impossible this task might seem--especially with hip-hop's African elements--the attempt to separate hip-hop from its cultural framework has been somewhat successful. Rarely are the origins of hip-hop discussed outside of the signature narrative stamped and approved by the corporate hip-hop industry: beginning with the Sugar Hill Gang and DJ Kool Herc.

However, hip-hop was cultivated in the post-Civil Rights, post-Black Power Movement Era, where the brutality of city-planning and economic initiatives proved to be as oppressive as segregation. Chang's comprehensive text discusses the rise and decline of New York City's youth entourages (often termed gangs), Afrika Bambaataa's movement for solidarity and the financial state of the union which would make Jay-Z a "product of Reganomics." Where hip-hop's savvy lyricists take-off, "Can't Stop Won't Stop finishes," providing a historical critique of the significant events which continued to define the music throughout its development.

"The scope and content of hip-hop has narrowed over the years; the range of images are much narrower than during the late 1980s," says Chang. "We really do have to get back to the political struggle." In reference to his own politicization, Chang makes a point of identifying his personal influences. "I came up during the Anti-Apartheid Movement. My mentors were non-Asian Americans." It is no surprise, then, that Chang's book is so centered; not in a superficial or patronizing way, but in a truth-be-told manner.

Chang discusses the more controversial aspects of hip-hop; the elements of the music grounded in the systematic oppression of Africans from Puerto Rico, Jamaica and the U.S. "The 'War on Drugs' paved the way for the Patriot Act," Chang proclaims. He blames hip-hop's fertility on the "politics of containment" and the "politics of abandonment," where poverty and social oppression cultivated the creativity of hip-hop's founders. Hence, hip-hop has transitioned from the gritty experiences of the oppressed to an entertaining pastime for Middle America. "We now have suburban whites identifying hip-hop with Black caricatures," says Chang. "Hip-hop has become a part of the main stream: it's now American culture."

Chang sees no reason for us to remain comfortable in the midst of ignorant bliss. Instead, he works towards destabilizing the Hollywood version of hip-hop: the perspective heavily laden with white-supremacist fantasies and corporate control. Chang revisits occurrences in hip-hop history with journalistic grace, from the truth behind New York City's gangs to the unlikely--and very white American--foundations of two of hip-hop's most influential publications: "The Source" and "XXL." More importantly, Chang is committed to "moving from Audiotopia to political action."

"Hip-hop is not in and of itself a revolution; you're not revolutionary solely because you're hip-hop," says Chang. According to Chang, the task is very evident. And the question becomes: "How do you take what we've gained in terms of cultural power and translate it into political power?" As Chang puts it, "Hip-hop provides an opening for creating mass political movements. It's the currency that allows folks to talk all over the world." And whether we want to acknowledge it or not, hip-hop is speaking volumes to the world, the question is what is it saying?

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}
by Stephanie Joy Tisdale {The Liberator Magazine 5.2 #15, 2006}

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Decadent and Awful Beauty: Haiti

2015-10-04T07:40:00.000-04:00

Editors’ Note: What follows is a “time travel” memoir of the author’s separate written accounts of visits to Haiti in 2007 and 2010. Each ellipsis (...) denotes a temporal pivot.

Before boarding the plane, I thought terrible things of my destination. One vivid image kept nagging me: A kidnapper raping a woman whose ransom of 10,000 U.S. dollars had not yet arrived. If someone kidnapped me, where would my mother procure such monies? Nevertheless, I paraded around the waiting area with a pride and diffidence that mocked the other travelers. If not the unsure gait, it was my nose buried in a too-thick “vacation” book. None of my musings prepared me for the clusters of vegetation-run mountains exploding into the sky with a defiance declaring, “I am greater than you.” The soft green mountain mounds strove to reach the clouds, but the most they ever got was the never-ending kiss of the sun. This sun-kiss twirled about the slopes of the mountains, leaving no secrets untouched or unknown.

We had arrived to the island nation of my birth -- Ayiti: Land of mountains. I wondered how I could imagine such horrendous things. If the sun made love to the mountains, how could anything within the mountains be terrible? The exchange between the mountains and the sun set the stage. There is an intense, fiery, and defiant relationship forever brewing in Haiti. I was aware of this loving relationship long before the scalding heat enveloped my legs awnd reclaimed me after 20 years of absence. In one short week, I would become one of its captivated lovers for life. And this was back in 2007.

Porters scurried around us, like bees dart around nectar. The anxiety in their yellowed, red-speckled eyes made me look down at my sandals in shame. But staring down just made me more aware of the porters’ shabbiness and desperation. Four of them surrounded me, and Sister fended off three. Their demand was simple: Help us by paying us to help you. However, we could not help, or was it would not? Sister knew the routine and was not for a moment deterred by their probing gazes. Those gazes searched the innermost tunnels of my soul, which, somehow, they knew came attached to my purse. So, I kept staring down to avoid their accusatory eyes, which screamed: “You’ve let us down, Amerikan” ...

... On January 11, 2010, I went home for my first research trip. Ten days of rummaging through the archives for scraps on Haitian state formation was the plan. I was nervous, so my colleaguebrother Greg Childs came with me to show support and explore parts of his own Haitian heritage. We weren’t in Port-au-Prince for more than 24 hours when the first earthquake hit ...

... Fire-roasted sweet corn; tender chickens being moistened with marinade on open grills mingling with dust from frantic drivers; baked conch meat with lime and pepper; young girls swaying their newly formed hips in front of hormone-enraged boys; the loud, crass, rapid fire Creole cacophony soothed my mind into a place of surprising comfort. Sister complained about uneven, unpaved roads. I was awestruck by the colorful vans and street food vendors. It was my first time back, but I knew I was home. The murky brown water that splashed over my toes near garbage-filled ravines also had young children and pigs swimming in it.

Oh, God. The children ...

... Tanpri, Mami, the child kept moaning, please, Mommy. The first earthquake had hit hours earlier and we huddled on makeshift beds made of branches and leaves. No one slept. You’d eventually pass out from exhaustion and wake up terrified because of another earthquake, or the moaning of the little boy begging his mother for comfort. She remained silent because life escaped her hours ago.

At 4:53 p.m., I sat on a chair looking for my room keys. I didn’t realize danger until a bookcase/TV stand slid in my direction. Once I popped out of my seat, the floor began sloping in the downward slant of the mountain, making the bookcase crash where I formerly sat. The noise and sinking sensation paralyzed me. Fortunately, my hostess’ soldier, emergency training took over. She told me to drop down and crawl in her direction toward the kitchen doorway. The air was white, with cement dust preventing sight or speech, on my part. Once I got to the kitchen doorway, she implored me to pray, but all I could get out was a mental “Oh, God ...”

... Haiti is poor as hell. There is no infrastructure investment. Therefore, hospitals are hard to come by. Forget about ambulances or state personnel coming to your rescue. There is garbage everywhere because we lack an organized system of sanitation. This leads to more filth, as the citizenry has no place to depose of their trash. Once the stench of rotting food and waste becomes overwhelming, people organize a massive burn in the yard. I did not see one oven while I was there. Charcoal-powered grills cook everything. And yes, it’s the best food you’ll ever have. But, peep this: To get the charcoal, you must cut down trees. There is no “green energy” business and no massive efforts exist to reforest the land. Therefore, when the hurricane season hits, Haiti is devastated ...

... In that moment, I knew that I wasn’t going to die. Instantaneous communication with the oversoul, I guess. According to this message, I was only home to bear witness. The world stopped rumbling and we realized we were sitting in a pool of fuel -- whether it was from the stove or fridge, I don’t know. While the ground was rumbling beneath me, similar to the way water transitions from soft to hard boil, the term “earthquake” never came to mind. However, I do recognize fire before it starts, so I told my hostess we had to be out -- now. She ran toward the back of the house to get her passport (not that having it would’ve done any good. The Haitian airport was U.S.-controlled and they were only letting U.S. citizens out).

I went to the front of the building and standing in the courtyard -- quiet disheveled -- was my Greg. For once, his smoking habit saved his life. It kept him out of his bedroom, which no longer had walls and the bed was now hanging off the side of the building. The men helped the hostess climb down the building. When it came time to help me, another earthquake hit and everyone had fled. I panicked and proceeded to jump off what was once a three-story building. Thankfully, Greg caught me before my bare feet hit the floor, which was peppered with glass shards, rocks and nails.

I watched the purples and pinks of the sun setting on the mountain town of Nazon, Port-auPrince. I thought I was crazy to note the beauty of the sunset in a moment of such crisis; but alas, I’m still noticing the seemingly irrelevant. I stood next to Greg and though we both knew help wasn’t coming, we prayed the earthquake was another blip to the outside world that ignores Haiti. We thought our mothers would worry less that way. We made corny jokes about natural disasters not being part of the graduate student’s survival manual and argued about our favorite authors. It wasn’t until nightfall and the radio broadcast that we learned what happened ...

... Education is a human right. But, rights are costly and those who are the “haves” will not invest in their brethren. The majority of the population is illiterate and will have no significant opportunities at “upward mobility.” School is too expensive for most. Speaking French, learned primarily through schooling, would enable many Haitians the license to work in hotels or multi-national factories where they could make a living wage. A living wage is defined here as one U.S. dollar, which is roughly equivalent to seven Haitian dollars. For those who live in the major cities -- Port-auPrince, Cap-Haitien, and Leogane -- there is no work or land to take care of. So, they do what Africans have done in the past -- they create beauty from the meagerness of their daily existence: Breathtaking, vibrant, soulshattering (yes, shattering, not shaking, because after you see some of this stuff, you simply lose pieces of yourself in it and gain parts from it!) pieces of art, metal-work, wood carvings -- and let us not even talk about the music. You become different.

The art -- the cultural strivings of a people so economically impoverished -- feeds your spirit. It makes you long to renounce everything you have been trained to disdain (poverty, family, sacrifice) and own it. Not own up to it -- as in, “I can do my part to help” -- no, own it. The hands that created this tableau are mine. I am dabbing paint here and there to echo the pain and suffering that rumbles in the belly of “mine” every night. I/they do this to feed the spirit as the body may not get fed ...

... Physically, I am alright. I know I need counseling because January 12, 2010 in Haiti remains a constant part of my daily routine. However, after 30 minutes of chatting, the therapist concluded I was depressed and needed medication. I looked at her and said, “Lady, it’s our first date -- I don’t get down that fast.” She didn’t care for my humor. In any case, the last time I saw her, I told her a world collapsed beneath my feet. I spent days hearing people dying around me. I’m not supposed to be OK. My immediate family is alright because most of us emigrated to the United States in the ‘80s ...

... No, you cannot go to Haiti and not empathize with those you see suffering. But, what is more poignant and beautiful about Haiti is this: They live. There is no money to chase. No title to covet. No imposed ideal to aspire and eventually fail at achieving. It is pure, guttural living. Am I being a romantic? Perhaps. For now, I’d rather be romantic and hopeful.

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}
by Nathalie Pierre {The Liberator Magazine 10.1 #25, 2011}

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The "Ujamaa" Process: Liberator Art Design

2015-10-04T07:30:00.000-04:00

Robert Trujillo, designer of our Ujamaa Reunion cover for Liberator 9.1 shared this on the process:

//////////"Real proud of this piece for The Liberator Magazine because I stepped a bit out of my comfort zone skill wise and I'm very honored to have my art featured on the cover of such a respectable, culturally relevant, and boundary pushing magazine such as the Liberator, which has been paying dues since 2002. The Water ripple effect is one I always wanted to try but never really felt ready for until now. The next step will be pulling this off with aerosol on a wall but for now, peep the process of how I arrived at the final illustration for this piece. The process shows the sketches, the color comps, the process of photo reference-where my crew mate Cece took many shots of me modeling the position I drew, the final sketch, one of my references, and the final piece." (source)//////////

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An Ujamaa Reunion (a prequel) / "By the 18th century, however, economists such as the English-born David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus took license to declare that the earth's resources were simply insufficient to support human populations."

2015-10-04T07:20:00.000-04:00

I am not an economist.

This fact stalked the progress of this essay over the last year. I tried to cram semesters worth of economic minutia into evening sittings. I toyed around with statistical models and consulted several of my economist-trained friends routinely. In turn, they playfully reminded me of the length of time it took each of them to apprehend the questions with which I was grappling. Still, I labored on, determined to make sense of this financial mess our community finds itself. For months, there was no breakthrough, just me, surrounded by colorful books with catchy titles, plodding language and excess facts.

Wading tortuously through financial titles that promised accessibility for the general reader merely increased my self-doubt. Kevin Phillips' Bad Money, Reckless Finance and Charles R. Morris' The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown left me satisfied until a student group at Howard University I was lecturing to on the concept of Ujamaa requested that I "make it plain." The lecture was my first attempt to examine the macroeconomic aspects of today's financial crisis by grounding it in economic history. Tight on the generalities but wanting on the specifics, I embarrassingly resorted to citing specific sections that could be more useful than my awkward explanations (random aside: I was pleasantly surprised by how large of a hit Kevin Phillips' piece was in the Black Nationalist community). I even watched Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room at least three times before I fully understood just how the "smartest guys" were able to project non-existing profits and hijack their employees' pensions. Prepared to make peace that the subject area exceeded my reach, I shelved the notes from my presentation.

I was inspired to continue in the same moment I was scolded for my financial illiteracy. Matt Taibbi, author of the provocative Rolling Stones Magazine article, "The Big Takeover,"(fn.1) spelled out clearly and a tad bit uncomfortably, exactly how the United States took an economic nosedive within the past decade. His statement bears repeating in its entirety:

"How's this for a story: Millions of citizens in the most technologically sophisticated country in the world and top ranked schools are useless to stop a bunch of robber barons from stealing their wealth for one reason, and one reason only. They do not understand what is happening and are too ashamed to admit it."(fn.2)

Perhaps not convinced that his readers were truly absorbing his words, Taibbi selected an analogy guaranteed to stir up emotion in American discourse. "There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power." (fn.3)

His words stung. My lack of understanding mirrored the political vapidity of an 18th century-bondsman. And yet, I felt vindicated by the fact that I was at least trying to understand.

Taibbi's article signaled an alternative course for this paper. I learned that the seeming complexity of economics is not the exclusive route one need travel to understand phenomenon related to or a consequence of what occurs in that domain. Prosaic truths are just as meaningful, if not more fundamental. His article was case-proof. Who couldn't be outraged by the vivid imagery he paints of "balding, middle-aged managers" literally "gang-raping" the "American Dream" using your tax dollars for lubrication? Seriously. Knowing the technical intricacies of credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations are still important, especially if one is a recent victim of foreclosure. But, the larger point is emphasis on the uber-technical details conceal another story, one more resonant with the human condition. Freed from my ignorance, however temporarily, the proceeding paragraphs took form.

Conventional Economics
As my old man used to instruct me back in the day, "Pull it from the root, it's easier." Taking heed of these words led me to the first stop -- Merriam-Websters Dictionary. The first time around, like any typical Generation X cohort accustomed to lightening speed Google searches, I dutifully transcribed the first definition for economics. It came pretty stock, describing it as a "social science concerned chiefly with the description and analysis of the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services."

These words had a familiar ring. I was involved in a casual relationship with Marxist and Anarchist thought during my undergraduate years so concepts like production, distribution and consumption were easy to grasp. Still, I experienced discomfort. Each term appeared neutral, as if timeless truths. However, this neutrality collided with our current context. To be "concerned chiefly" with these terms was to privilege industrialism -- the period when hulking machines that coughed up coal and spat out steam dotted Western Europe's landscape. This emphasis is hardly surprising considering the bulk of Western scholars agree, "Before the 17th century, there is little worthy of the name economics." (fn.4)

So there was a history to this perplexing rhetoric. The architects of this confusing world of numbers and stats had actually invented this arcane language to accomplish precisely that. Indeed, it was in the industrial age that economics was first theorized as little more than "merchandising, bookkeeping … and the elaboration of a mathematical worldview." (fn.5) Needing to justify their value in the expanding European states, the "mercantilists (emerging bourgeoisie) invented a calculus whose mystique justified the privileging of incomes from trade, manufacture and finance above the economic consequences and social priorities of inherited wealth." (fn.6)

In so doing, economics was emptied of its practice of assigning spiritual and kinship value to items that prevented its commodification, a practice Marx attributed to "crude superstitions." (fn.7) As the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss observed, some societies operated on an exchange principle: There are things that are given, things that are sold, and things that must not be given or sold, but kept. This worldview prohibited the act of accumulation for accumulation's sake -- a view Aristotle thought inherently irrational. (fn.8) Understandings of value that suggested that things possess a spiritual character annoyed Enlightenment thinkers; as a result, these worldviews were repainted with a sleek, cold, scientism that scoffed at the notion of anyone other than merchants (and subsequently those operating in today's financial sector) could actually explain or apprehend how exchange works among humans.

So what were some of the other legacies these erudite and materially ambitious men bequeathed to us, those that have shaped and coddled our most basic assumptions of life in the last three centuries? Well, the first inheritance is the notion of scarcity, a theory that underpins modern economics. The evolution of the idea of scarcity is scarcely explained (pun intended). In the classical world, scarcity was defined in relationship to need. It functioned as a prediction of what was possible if these two variables became overly imbalanced. In fact, this definition resisted a comprehensive projection. Scarcity could mean both the insufficient availability of wheat for hungry farmers and the insufficiency of diamonds for wealthy merchants. It was all a matter of subjective desire and circumstance. It presumed the world possessed sufficient resources and it was only the irrational greed of man that threatened this fundamental fact.

By the 18th century, however, economists such as the English-born David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus took license to declare that the earth's resources were simply insufficient to support human populations. (fn.9) The concept of greed -- prominent in earlier considerations -- now could matter less. Ricardo and his gloomy analysis were not born in a vacuum. Residing in England at a time when the enclosure movement aggressively forced thousands of people their rural plots and drove them into congested cities where the only "value" they now possessed was the selling of their labor to factories clues us on how he arrived at such dark conclusions. (fn.10) Dark indeed, for the preoccupation with impending death defined economics for Ricardo and his intellectual comrades. Man labored under the threat of death, since in Ricardo's estimation, overpopulation (as observed by him in England) meant individuals and families were obliged to risk physical harm taking on increasingly difficult labor tasks to simply subsist. Combined with Malthusian dogma -- population growth threatens the supply of available finite resources -- scarcity was codified as a sacred canon of economics. One of the more powerful images today that captures this perspective is the stereotypical horde of Wall Street brokers clamoring to sell or purchase stock routinely depicted in Hollywood. The scene suggests brutal competition is not an option, but a social fact.

Scarcity also nurtured understandings of goods and services, those seemingly innocuous terms we encountered in Webster. Each term relies on scarcity for its value. Both goods and services are studied within context of their limited supply with a particular emphasis on how societies manage the allocation of these finite resources. Interestingly, Wikipedia asserts that the term 'goods' not only presume scarcity for economists, it occasions an entirely new name -- free goods -- if it is associated with abundance.

Another preoccupation of these theorists was use-value. (fn.11) Use-value, that is the assignment of coins (money) as wealth detached from any object, gradually displaced the exchange-value system. In scrambling for ways to legitimize the assignment of value for objects, these scholars leaped to esoteric realms. Use-value came packaged in the assumption that labor in and of itself was adequate to determine the price of an item. However, by abstracting value in this manner, it allowed the crude reduction of all items (and human beings) to be considered commodities. This price was set by the delicate dance between what is available for consumption and the intensity of the desire to consume the item. This "dance" continued until both parties were satisfied, and it is within that satisfaction, the price of an item was achieved.

But, as Dan Ariely demonstrates in his latest book, Predictably Irrational, most humans still don't get that value, as a rule, is relative. Most people, he illustrates, do not know what they want or what they would pay for absent of context. For instance, if presented with an item considered pleasurable that is not attached to a price, some are utterly confused on what "price-value" should be assigned to that object. The tragedy of this knowledge is that while economics suggests we are rational beings making rational decisions, our everyday behavior in terms of our spending habits contradicts this supposed truth. It is why, in the words of Ariely, a person has no problem "adding $200 to a $5,000 catering bill for a soup entrée, when the same person will clip coupons to save 25 cents on a one-dollar can of condensed soup." (fn.12) Our behavior is irrational precisely because we think it is rational! More fundamentally, the indoctrination of economics as a set of objective laws translates into an acute and costly ignorance of our subjective behaviors within this system.

Economics presents itself as a function of universal law, the gritty texture of the bottom-line we must all prostrate before at the end of the day. The "market" governs this world. Its [the market] national motto reads, "Fuck you. Pay me!" And yet, humans continue to adhere to social norms that mock the prescribed laws of the market. We understand that to offer "money" for an enjoyable dinner is a sign of disrespect. We volunteer our "services" freely, carving out time because the social benefits are inviting. Wages, prices, rents, interest, and costs-and-benefits -- how familiar are we with their central roles in organizing our lives? Whether people understand the history of these concepts (and they do have a history), we are obliged to appreciate how they function in our lives. Economists mistake this appreciation for reverence. In fact, social exchanges has proven to play an equally meaningful role in everyday life, if not more so. (fn.13) Market norms enjoy precedence in economic decisions for one reason and one reason only: they are based on what we remember. Ariely puts it this way: "the relationships set in the marketplace between supply and demand are not based on preferences but on memory." (fn.14) To be sure then, if our memory is extended beyond the established (industrial) border, the economic behaviors typically relegated to anthropology can be treated with proportionate seriousness.

Old-World Definitions
From this bridge I was able to observe how economics was appropriated and recast in the 17th and 18th centuries. Now knowing there lurked a concealed past behind this representation of economics, I searched and found alternative representations, hidden, of course, in plain sight. In this case, it was the second definition listed in Webster's dictionary: "Of or relating to the household or its management."

The second definition, though brief, opens a world to us long buried under the preoccupations of self-righteous European men. The esteemed Greek philosopher Aristotle established the etymological origins of economics. It is broken down into two terms, oikos-nomy. Nomy, in Greek, is simply the law of. We are familiar with this term through most of the knowledge systems taken in formal schooling such as astronomy. Oikos is thus the crucial word. It translates into the transmission of property and thus clarifies the definition offered by "Mr. Webster."

At its root, economics is simply the laws that govern the transmission of property. Thus, the household was the economic unit. More intriguingly, the "managers" of the household, responsible for the production and distribution of goods (clothes and food) and services (cleaning and cooking) were, naturally, women. When I first presented this understanding to my colleagues, it raked some of them the wrong way. By choosing the term "natural," it appeared as if I was justifying the domestic role of women. However, to apprehend the significance of this role it is important to note that ancient households, unlike today's households, were not simply units of consumption. They were sites built for both production and consumption. Think of it as akin to the role of a manager at a small business rather than a modern housewife, especially considering that many of these households featured slaves and cheap migrant labor. Moreover, public duties included the maintenance of agricultural crops and the contracting of migrant and day laborers from available markets.

As Greek society transitioned its emphasis from the private to the public arenas, the role of women was dismissed and devalued. This is not to suggest that the administration of enslaved labor was a virtue due to its feminine face. I cite this fact because women (and male heads of the household) tended to operate from a basis of sufficiency, a consequence of the household as primary. Aristotle deliberately excluded men from his classical definition of economics despite his stated belief in the superiority of men. (fn.15) He disapprovingly cited their pursuit of unlimited wealth in the public sphere as unsustainable and disruptive of the stable household order that operated on the basis of self-sufficiency. (fn.16)

These social relations were converted to legend after the -polis was promoted as the ideal arena of human activity. Greek men conspired successfully to prevent women from holding property. Terrified of women's potential to betray their spouses and marry "strangers," thereby filching their property rights, women were recast as sinisterly secretive (witch-like). This assignment interestingly persisted up through the witch-hunts during the Middle Ages in Europe, a hysterical period not coincidentally driven by fear of the power female mystics welded in radical egalitarian movements. (fn.17) Because Aristotle located the household as the authentic site of economics, the majority of economists, given to the notion that capitalism and commerce are the staples of economic behavior (both public activities), disqualified him as an economist.

Robinson captures the true tragedy in this moment: "Economics as a science or as an historical subject [then and now], discounts whatever contributions or knowledge female household management might have accumulated." (fn.18) This accumulated knowledge spanned several millennia, which in essence, means Western males have been conducting science experiments in their backyard without the aid of established blueprints. And this cycle continues, evidenced not only by the fact economic science is viewed as the domain of males but also in the privileging of wage labor, also commonly understood to be a male preserve. It is one of the main reasons trade unions, despite the significant gains it has achieved for working-classes, is unable to transform the structures it rails against. Forged in the crucible of a racist and sexist state, it accommodates both racism (xenophobia) and sexism without self-awareness of the contradictions. (fn.19) This is precisely because the existing structures have long made peace with such contradictions, obsessively seeking rationales for its hypocrisy. If nothing else the investigation showed a new path, paradoxically old, beckons.

Invisible Borders
The frame is essential for any discussion for they are the invisible borders that govern what is allowed, and more importantly, those areas of discussion considered taboo. Political theorist George Lakoff puts it this way: “Framing is about getting the language that fits your worldview. It is not just language. The ideas are primary -- and the language carries those ideas, evoke those ideas.” (fn.20) The standard definition Webster offers of economics is not simply descriptive. It proposes a worldview. That worldview arrogantly begins its narrative in the Industrial Age and consigns all manners of human exchange preceding it to the trashbin of history. It asserts in absolute terms that economics is merely the activities which occur in the public sphere (commerce/capitalism). Notwithstanding the aggressiveness and repetitiveness of this assertion, this article hopefully demonstrated that alternative understandings are available. In an era of excess and waste, the model of subsistence economics based around households as evidenced in Greek and early Roman societies invite us to "unthink" our assumptions of scarcity, price-value and the market. To unthink, however, requires more than mere deconstruction. (fn.21) It also demands the exploration and application of viable alternatives, the agenda I have set for the second part of this article in relation to the African Diaspora.

If there is one day earmarked for serious contemplation on the impact of economics in African American (and by extension African Diasporic) communities, it is without a doubt the fourth day of the week-long Kwanzaa holiday when the principle of Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics) is celebrated. In these urgent times, it is safe to predict that the discussions held around this principle this coming January will largely focus on the dire state of the United States economy. And dire it is indeed. A report from the United for a Fair Economy published last year predicted that the subprime mortgage crisis will likely cause "people of color to lose up to $213 billion, a startling figure that ranks as the greatest loss of wealth in modern U.S. history."(fn.22) Even so, this statistic only clues us in on the stresses of the self-identified middle classes in our community. For the majority of black families left to eke out a living in apocalyptic conditions where housing buildings ceased being maintained (fn.23) and the crack epidemic spawned a fratricidal war of tremendous proportions yet to peter out, the scornful laughter of hardship has been echoing faintly for quite some time between empty factory walls and the invisible lines drawn and defended by working-class whites seeking nothing short of a permanent quarantine. (fn.24) Given these tragic histories, the coming Kwanzaa celebration, specifically the day Ujamaa is consecrated, offers a crucial opportunity for a national and global conversation on how best to begin the steep climb out of this financial mess. The framing of this discussion will prove even more crucial. -END-

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by Melvin Barrolle {The Liberator Magazine 9.1 #24, 2010}
{artwork by Robert Trujillo, The Liberator Magazine}

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Requiem for a Time-Keeper: John Henrik Clarke

2015-10-04T06:40:00.000-04:00

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Jazz & Justice Radio: A Cultural and Political Genealogy of Dr. John Henrik Clarke by Dr. Greg Carr

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On the yearning for the phantom messiah / "A crisis now stands at the forefront of Negro Political Thought"

2015-10-04T06:10:00.000-04:00

Probably since the first nigga was thrown into the hull of the slave ship, niggas have maintained some vague hope that a messiah would come along and restore order to the chaos of nigga life. As the ship seared across the Atlantic, the slave dreamt of a savior who would one day arrive and destroy his chains, place cool rags on his whip-ravished back, and return him (figuratively or literally) to the replenishing, sweet milk of Africa.

The nigga has clung to this dream for roughly 500 years and no messiah has appeared. Malcolm and Martin were two candidates but after their deaths the nigga populace began losing hope in this dream until the emergence of Obama. Nevertheless, as presidents are inherently tied to the status quo, many niggas are realizing that Obama is in fact not their messiah.

A crisis now stands at the forefront of Negro Political Thought: Who can really save us? The negro may go on being transfixed by this question for another 500 years.

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Dialogue Across Time: Baldwin talks w/ Danticat, Freire, Kincaid & others

2015-10-04T04:20:00.000-04:00

So much has been written about formal schooling.

Leslie Silko writes, “There are a great many parallels between Pueblo experiences and those of African and Caribbean peoples-one is that we have all had the conqueror's language imposed on us. But our experience with English has been somewhat different in that the Bureau of Indian Affairs schools were not interested in teaching us the canon of Western classics. For instance, we never heard of Shakespeare. We were given Dick and Jane, and I can remember reading that the robins were heading south for the winter. It took me a long time to figure out what s going on. I worried for quite a while about our robins in Laguna because they didn't leave in the winter, until I finally realized that all the big textbook companies are up in Boston and their robins do go south in the winter. But in a way, this dreadful formal education freed us by encouraging us to maintain our narratives. What ever literature we were exposed to at school (which was damn little), at home the storytelling, the special regard for telling and bringing together through the telling was going on constantly.”

Andrea Levy writes, “They didn't sit us in front of the fire and tell long tales of life in Jamaica - of palm trees and yams and playing by rivers. There was no 'oral tradition' in our family. Most of my childhood questions to them were answered with, 'That was a long time ago,' or 'what you want to now about that for?' And if Mum ever let something slip - ' You know your dad lived in a big house,' - then I was told with a wagging finger not to go babbling it about to my friend, not to repeat it to anyone…We had to write essays telling the facts - how the slaves were captured then transported from Africa to the New World. We drew diagrams of how the triangular trade in slaves worked, like we drew diagrams of sheep farming in Australia. I hated those lessons.”

And Leslie Silko writes, “Maybe the newcomers need another five hundred or even a thousand years to learn how to live with the earth here, but when the water has run out, their time will have run out too. Who will be left? Only a few remember how the desert nourishes her children who live with her. When they look at photographs of Los Angeles or Las Vegas, they will be amazed that the strangers lasted as long as they did.”

Jamaica Kincaid writes, “What should a human being know?”

Patrick Chamoiseau writes, “Big Bellybutton…he had to be working his hands: he'd scrape at his desk, scratch his feet, rub his nose, twist onto one buttock, then the other, as though his constrained body required a swarm of tactile sensations to participate in the world. He loved to fiddle with chalk, slates, pens, and was constantly flipping notebooks open and closed. He was a little guy with blue-black skin, sharp eyes, hair scorched rusty-red and frazzled by the sun, a body that was already tough and muscular…[I] could see the energy in Big Bellybutton's hands…And above all, [I] saw that Big Bellybutton hadn't lost this ability to smile, which showed his benchmate (who was touched to the heart) how secure he was in the core of his being.”

Gloria Anzuldúa writes, “I will not be shamed again/Nor will I shame myself…The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in the outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Noting happens in the “real” world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.”

Simone Schwarz-Bart writes, “Tac-Tac…Didn't open his lips to anyone, hadn't time he said…taking off with his huge bamboo, eyes shut, veins standing out on his neck, it was Tac-Tac starting to speak, according to him, all the languages on earth. And he blew with his whole body, in fits and starts…which traveled straight through the vault of the forest and into our bosoms, in shudders, in sobs, in love.”

And James Baldwin writes, "If I am not what I've been told I am, then it means that you're not what you thought you were either...It means that well-meaning white liberals place themselves in great danger when they try to deal with Negroes as though they were missionaries. It means, in brief, that a great price is demanded...a price is demanded to liberate all those white children-some of them near forty-who have never grown up, and who never will grow up, because they have no sense of their identity...If I were a teacher...and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours every day...I would suggest to him that the popular culture - as represented, for example, on television and in comic books and in movies...that the press they read is not as free as it says it is-and he they can do something about that, too. I would try to make them know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger...I would suggest to him that he is living, at the moment, in an enormous province. America is not the world and if America is going to become a nation, she must find a way - and this child must help her to find a way to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy."

Jamaica Kincaid writes, “[The teacher] had got close enough so that her eyes caught a glimpse of what I had done to my textbook. The glimpse soon led to closer inspection. It was bad enough that I had defaced my schoolbook by writing in it. That I should write under the picture of Columbus “The Great Man Can No Longer Just Get Up and Go” was just too much. I had gone too far this time, defaming one oft the great men in history, Christopher Columbus, discoverer of my island that we my home. And now look at me. I was not even hanging my heed in remorse.”

Anna Deveare-Smith writes, “If you say a word enough, it becomes you.”

Paulo Freire writes, Men and women rarely admit their fea4r of freedom openly, however, tending rather to camouflage it-sometimes unconsciously-by presenting themselves as defenders of freedom. They give their doubts and misgivings an air of profound sobriety, as befitting custodians of freedom. But they confuse freedom with maintenance of the status quo; so that if conscientizacao threatens to place that status quo in question, it thereby seems to constitute a threat to freedom itself.”

Simone Schwarz-Bart writes, “Amboise playing his drum, as if all he's ever seen or heard, everything he knew from today and yesterday was at the tips of his outstretched fingers.”

Gianni Rodari writes, “I threw myself into reading books written in German, with the passion, fury, and desire that are a hundred times more fruitful for young people than a hundred years of school...Perhaps it was because of this that I was not a boring teacher. I told the children stories without the least reference to reality or to good common sense. And most of these were ones that I invented by making use of the 'techniques' that [Andre] Breton had promoted and at the same time deprecated.”

Sherman Alexie writes, “I picked up a basketball for the first time and made my first shot. No. I missed my first shot, missed the basket completely, and the ball landed in the dirt and sawdust, sat there just like I had sat there only minutes before…But it felt good, that ball in my hands, all those possibilities and angles. It was mathematics, geometry. It was beautiful…At that same moment, my cousin Steven Ford sniffed rubber cement from a paper bag and leaned back on the merry-go-round. His ears rang, his mouth was dry, and everyone seemed so far away…But it felt good, that buzz in his head, all those colors and noises. It was chemistry, biology. It was beautiful…Oh, do you remember those sweet, almost innocent choices that the Indian boys were forced to make?”

Fredrick Nietzsche writes, “Any desire to experience something for himself and to sense how his own experiences grow inside him into an integrated an organic system is numbed and, as it were, intoxicated by the illusory promise that in the span of a few short years it will be possible to collect in himself the highest and most remarkable experiences of older ages, especially the greatest of these. It is exactly the same insane method that drives our young painters into the art museums and galleries instead of into the workshop of a master, and above all into the singular workshop of the singular master…as if life itself were not a craft that has constantly to be learned from the ground up and relentlessly practiced if it is supposed to produce anything but bunglers and babblers!”

Lorraine Hansberry writes, “Mama, you don't understand. It's all a matter of ideas, and God is just one idea I don't accept. It's not important. I am not going out and be immoral or commit cries because I don't believe in God. I don't even think about it. It's just that I get tired of Him getting credit for all the things the human race achieves through its own stubborn effort. There simply is no blasted God-there is only man and it is he who makes miracles!' (MAMA absorbs this speech, studies her daughter and rises slowly and crosses to BENEATHA and slaps her powerfully across the face. After, there is only silence and the daughter drops her eyes from her mother's face, and MAMA is very tall before her) Now-you say after me, in my mother's house there is still God. (there is a long pause and BENEATHA stares at the floor wordlessly. MAMA repeats the phrase with precision and cool emotion) In my mother's house there is still God.”

Leslie Silko writes, “The ancient Pueblo people sought a communal truth, not an absolute truth. For them this truth lived somewhere with the web of differing versions, disputes over minor points, and outright contradictions tangling with old feuds and village rivalries…There is no high mesa edge or mountain peak where one can stand and not immediately be part of all that surrounds.”

Simone Schwarz-Bart writes, "She entered the circle first, lifting up her dress generously on either side as if to indicate that she opened her womb and her bosom before the company. All round and full, she made one think of a breadfruit covered in curls and when she started to dance she was a breadfruit that's knocked off the tree with a pole and rolls right down the hill, along paths and tracks, falling rising with such energy she made us forget the ground beneath her feet was really flat.”

Giannni Rodari writes, “I am concerned with perceiving how any word chosen by chance can function as a magical word to exhume fields of memory that have rested under the dust of time.”

Sherman Alexie writes, “All of the Indians must have tragic features: tragic noses, eyes, and arms. Their hands and fingers must be tragic when they reach for tragic food. The hero must be a half-breed, half white and half Indian, preferably from a horse culture. He should often weep alone…If the hero is an Indian woman, she is beautiful. She must be slender and in love with a white man. But if she loves an Indian man then he must be a half-breed, preferably from a horse culture…She should be compared to nature: brown hills, mountains, fertile valleys, dewy grass, wind, and clear water….Indians must see visions. White people can have the same visions if they are in love with Indians. If a white person loves an Indian then the white person is Indian by proximity. White people must carry an Indian deep inside themselves. Those interior Indians are half-breed and obviously from horse cultures…In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.”

Jamaica Kincaid writes, “On the wall behind the wooden table and chair was a map; at the top of the map were the words, ‘THE BRITISH EMPIRE.’ These were the first words I learned to read…My mother died the moment I was born…Where is my father? What good could an education do for someone like me? What could be seen in my eyes?”

Edwidge Danticat writes, “I once heard an elder say that the dead who have not use for their words leave them as part of their children's inheritance. Proverbs, teeth suckings, obscenities, even grunts and moans once inserted in special places during conversion, all are passed to the next her…I hear the weight of the river all the time…It is perhaps the great discomfort of those trying to slice the world to discover that we have voices sealed inside our heads, voices that with each passing day, grow even louder than the clamor of the world outside.”

Chinua Achebe writes, “James Baldwin's bafflement, childlike-which does not mean simpleminded but deeply profound and saintly -comes across again and again an nowhere better perhaps than in his essay 'Fifth Avenue, Uptown.' 'Negroes want to be treated like men: a perfectly straightforward statement containing only seven words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable.'”

Ishmael Reed writes, “Those who say that the standard of an American common culture should be European are in fact separatists. And few of them know the European culture which they champion, for anybody who has traveled to Europe will discover that there is no monolithic European culture. Although historians like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., discourage the learning of African Amerindian cultures, it is quite possible that Americans can benefit from their examples…Before [Europeans'] arrival, the Pueblo people, according to Leslie Silko in her book Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit…”

Leslie Silko writes, “I had a tremendous sense of the presence of the oldest spirit beings right there in Europe, and that lost of Europeans, even the ones that don't know it, are still part of that. As hard as Christianity tried to wipe it out, and tried to break that connection between the Europeans and the earth, and the plants and the animals-even though they've been broken from it longer than the indigenous people of the Americas or Africa-that connection won't break completely. That experience was so strong that I wanted to acknowledge it a little.”

Gianni Rodari writes, “I hope that this small book can be useful for all those people who believe it is necessary for the imagination to have a place in education; for all those who trust in the creativity of children; and for all those who know the liberating value of the word. 'Every possible use of words should be made available to every single person' -- this seems to me to be a good motto with a democratic sound. Not because everyone should be an artist but because no one should be a slave.”

And Langston Hughes writes, “This is my theme for English B.”

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The Word As Bond / Mdw Ntr, Divine Speech: A Historiographical Reflection of African Deep Thought From the Time of the Pharaohs to the Present {reading notes}

2015-10-04T03:40:00.000-04:00

“Speech is my hammer/ bang the world and it's shaped/ now let it fall” (Mos Def).

Growing up, I remember hearing young people use terms like, “Word is Bond.” So much so, I didn’t always grasp the depth of this phrase: what people were really saying. Over the years, I started to realize that when using this phrase, most people were referring to the fact that 1) a person’s word is equivalent to a binding agreement/statement or 2) what had been stated was, in fact, truth. Either way, it was clear that word was bond: that word was enough.

As I’ve gotten older — and hopefully wiser — I have begun to realize the sanctity of spoken words. When I think about the function of speech in oral societies, where speech itself reigns supreme, I reflect on how important speech is to African people. It is interesting how, far from the continent, individuals of African descent are still holding on to the value systems — derived from Africa — which privilege speech and the spoken word.

In Mdw Ntr, Divine Speech: A Historiographical Reflection of African Deep Thought From the Time of the Pharaohs to the Present (1995), Dr. Jacob Carruthers gives an impressively thorough chronology of the role that speech plays in the cultural foundations of Ancient Kemet, the Western Sudan (West and Central Africa) and the Southern regions of the continent. With the complete depth of a sophisticated scholar (please note that the homage paid is simply due, ase) Carruthers provides a detailed analysis of the African experience as it relates to speech, more importantly divine speech (as it has informed the realties of Africans since the beginning). What makes the text even more interesting (and subsequently even more valuable) is the depth with which Carruthers addresses each aspect of speech (as it is practiced and utilized among African people across the continent).

Throughout the text, Carruthers exhausts various methods of approaching this sacred element of African cultural practice and tradition. He writes: “In Africa, speech cannot be reduced to a mere medium of exchange. Speech may be considered the servant of thought, but it is an essential servant” (96). Thus, speech is deemed a process of thought, an end result of thoughtful analysis. Carruthers notes that among Ancient Kemites mdw ntr or “Medew Netcher” referred to “God/Divine Speech.” He compares the pictorial representation of mdw (speech) — which means staff or cane (as in old-age) — to the concept of Hu, which refers to authoritative utterance or articulate command (45). Consequently, mdw (in the sense of mdw nfr or beautiful speech which may, in fact, be mastered* by humanity) is more about profound thought coupled with the accurate presentation of that thought than simply about eloquence in one’s verbal presentation alone.

Basing much of his conversation off of the Shabaka Text, Carruthers accomplishes several tasks in the text. He critiques modern African scholarship about African Deep Thought, or the complicated elements of the African experience, which have been compared to philosophy, metaphysics, religion, etc. Carruthers also investigates the Deep Thought of “basic Africa” as it is experienced an expressed among traditional groups like the Dinka, Dogon, Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, Soto-Tswana, Gikuyu, Bambara/Fulani. He writes that:

“For the Kemites, speech is really the operational base of knowledge, i.e. it is through speech that we know... In other words, one thinks in speech. Even when one only “thinks” about thinking, one thinks through (silent) speech. Thus, one may say the ‘word’ truly creates for human consciousness. At least it authorizes and verifies that which is created... In that sense, speech and creation are inseparable, and all of what we call theology, philosophy, science and even technology are aspects of divine speech” (44). [Italics mine].

Simply put, Divine Speech exists as the manifestation of refined thought and action.

With the grace of a true scribe, Carruthers delves into the core of the African lived experience, as it relates to creation, articulation and mastery: all of which are divinely inspired. More importantly, Carruthers brings to light the truly African elements of the oral tradition, which are necessarily immaculate in their nature. Mdw Ntr is compelling and successful. It is a noteworthy text that requires conceptual freshness and an appreciation for precise scholarship.

Although I cannot be too sure about the origins of the famed phrase “word is bond,” nor the cultural ramifications of the saying, I am certain that it is an example of how inadvertently Africa has been extended.

Notes:
* Please note that although mdw ntr is attainable, it is not necessarily mastered by every human being simply because divine speech implies communion with and adherence to divine order and balance. Moreover, humanity is plagued with aspects of “bad speech” (as opposed to mdw nfr “good/beautiful” speech) reflected in the words and deeds of evildoers and/or those who are ignorant of divine speech. Carruthers writes: “Good Speech, however, was the domain of humanity. Individuals could chose between Good Speech and not-good speech as in mdw dw (evil speech)... and tftf (idle chatter). Only Medew Nefer [mdw nfr] was in accord with Medew Netcher [mdw ntr]. In fact, it is through the consistent practice of Medew Nefer that human beings finally attained Medew Netcher, Divine Speech” (40).

** “Does the Word in Africa have a proper meaning? Could a diachronic study of the Word in Africa be undertaken? What is the meaningful particularity of the African Word since the Egyptian Mdw Ntr (hieroglyphs) to Nommo, the Spoken Word of the Dogon of Mali? All these questions pertaining to History and Philosophy are carefully and thoroughly examined in this book. It is a great honor to recommend this book not only to the specialist but to all those interested in conducting research in African and African American studies.”
(–Dr. Theophile Obenga)

*** “This book is a philosophical wake up call. I hope after reading it a large number of people will go beyond the book and find new values (in the works of others) …calling for a total reexamination of the role and contribution of African people to world history. Deep thought is a weapon in the war for liberation. Prof. Carruthers has helped us sharpen our tools for the intellectual battles of the present and the future.”
(–Dr. John Henrik Clarke)

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How To Get Out The Game / Interview w/ a Former Crack Dealer

2015-10-04T02:45:00.000-04:00

What is plaguing the black community is obvious. Crack cocaine was introduced to black communities during the early 1980’s by the CIA, many speculate, as an international money making scheme to fund foreign wars in both Nicaragua and Iran. The urban black population owns no planes, helicopters, runways or launch pads. The potent drug has become the idolized rock we hear about daily in mainstream music. Former drug dealers turned rappers are the Cinderella stories of our time, but the stories are getting old. The Liberator sat down for an in-depth interview with a man who knows the game and has lived the first chapter of the Cinderella story. Fortunately, he closed the book before the fairytale was over.

“It’s a gamble. So many illusions you gotta play, sometimes you gotta lie. You win or you loose ain’t no in-between.”

His words caress the heart like truth. That they appear in the Liberator is no coincidence.

Question: How are our kids, brothers, sisters, even mothers and fathers getting caught up in this mess?

Answer: It’s a part of life actually, everybody wanna make it. It depends how you want to make it. Sellin’ is accessible but hard. You gotta’ be an accountant cause you gotta’ get that next brick. You’re introduced through TV, mass media, that’s your intro.

Q: Why can’t cats just “say no?”

A: (He laughs) It’s part of culture. As America grows so does drugs, they go hand in hand, if it’s prescription, legal, illegal, alcohol--drugs is profitable. Mother-f***ers is making livin's, makin’ livin’s off of sellin’ drugs. In this life at least.

Q: But it’s not inescapable right?

A: It’s ingrained. The U.S. they been gangsterin’ cats ever since whenever. If drugs go away, the culture has to leave. Legal and illegal things make America grow.

Q: How does the U.S. metaphor mix in?

A: Just like a person in the hood, he dumpin’ and he got a job. Just like America supplying guns to a country, speadin’ confusion, they kill each other and America comes in and starts gangsterin' them cats.

Q: Is there any little bit of hope at all?

A: Hope is to graduate through the game and live through another day, that’s the only hope. Or… transformin’ the game.

Q: Explain.

A: You got cats who take what they make in the game and turn around and do something else with it. Like real estate. All them Corlion cats, them niggas was smart, but they was drug dealers.

Q: If you’re trying to do something positive with drug money it seems like the most positive thing you could do is to stop profiting from it.

A: Cats respected Cliff Huxtable. But you know who they wanted to be like? Tony Montana [Scarface]. They wanna’ live like Tony Montana and not get killed. They love style and the girls like it too. [Girls are] really attracted to warriors. But the warriors turned out to be gangbangers and dealers. They like that person who stands up against the grain, that “I won’t be denied” attitude. Yes, it’s not good cause sometimes you gotta’ lie, you gotta’ sell a product to someone that you know is bad for you. You going against your natural self.

Q: You make it sound like there’s no way out. The article is called “how to get out.”

A: (With a chuckle) You gotta find something else to supply that business habit. You like being able to sell your product, you out there movin’ around, being communal with your brothers. Ya’ll makin’ a unit, there’s a lot of exchangin’ goin’ on.

Q: So taking the entrepreneurial skills and making more positive moves with them?

A: That’s a way. The best way is to get your spirituality right, get some spiritual food, that should help change your mind state. Eat better food. Watching betting things. Doing better things. A lot of times we make bad decisions because we don’t have enough O2 (oxygen) in our brains, clogged up with coffee sugar, crack, marijuana for some. Those are the elements that get us off that spiritual plane that we be on.

Q: That seems like common sense, now it sounds too easy.

A: It’s not just the game it’s the wager involved.

Q: So how is a poor person supposed to choose those good things over a pile of money?

A: Your sustainer is God. You’re totally dependant on god, whether good or bad. So there’s no reason for you to run for the money. You have a free will to do wrong or right but your life is written for you. Man wants other than what God wants for him. That’s the problem, you want more. Man is not content. Some men, most men, those men. Whoever those men are. (Smiles)

Q: And if God doesn’t feed me today?

A: If you don’t eat today, or if you get one meal, your content with one meal. The reasons they go crazy is because they are living two lives. If you know you’re doing something that can send you to hell that will drive you insane.

Q: Some people worry that people aren’t creative enough to find other ways to make money. It’s either the NBA or the music industry.

A: They used to sell rabbits. It’s cool to eat, but not that good of an animal. They was selling it and getting’ money. It wasn’t the best product, but they went out and got something to sell. It was called being creative.

Q: Last words?

A: I repent. I know everything that I’ve done is not going to be accepted, because I do some things that I know not to do. That’s how it goes.

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Gary '72: In Search of a Post-Civil Rights Politics / "Pressing relentlessly against the limits of the 'realistic'"

2015-10-04T01:50:00.000-04:00

The debate over the strengths and weaknesses of "post-racial" as a category to explain our current political moment has mostly exhausted itself. The recent dust-up between Cornel West and Melissa Harris-Perry over the Obama administration's failure to protect the interest of poor and working class folks illuminates some of the ways race has returned into progressive political conversations. Where the Right has not so subtly used white populist dog-whistle politics to paint Barack Obama as "the other," politicians on the Left have dropped explicit references to race from their discursive strategies. Partially because multicultural coalitions are now firmly crystallized on the left side of the political spectrum; partially because the right has successfully demonized anything that may appear to be "reverse racism."

At a moment when race still marks the lives of millions of poor and working class folks, it may be instructive to return to the historical moments when it was critical to national political strategies. In the last gasp of the New Deal order, before the Right began successfully capturing the votes of the former white working-class.

The National Black Political Convention, held in the Spring of 1972 in Gary, Indiana, was convened in response to the radical shifts occurring in the black political Left. Black Nationalists, Marxists, integrationists, and black elected officials came together to carve out a National Black Political Agenda that would address questions of education, healthcare, community control and economic self-determination. While idealistic, the NBPC recognized that only through idealism could a wholly new, equitable society be realized:

"At every critical moment of our struggle in America we have had to press relentlessly against the limits of the 'realistic' to create new realities for the life of our people. This is our challenge at Gary and beyond, for a new Black politics demands new vision, new hope and new definitions of the possible. Our time has come. These things are necessary. All things are possible."

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On the Disappearance of the Black Community / "Still fracturing today"

2015-10-04T01:40:00.000-04:00

The Oxford Dictionary defines community as "a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals".

It does not require much effort on behalf of the casual observer to see that America's black communities are, at best, fractured and still fracturing today. Without sifting through similar phenomena taking place amongst other cultural and ethnic groups, we see plainly and without much effort that the above definition of community is hard pressed to show itself being manifest among blacks.

Most often, black neighborhoods are defined by the pigmentation of the residents living there and nothing more. One look inside each apartment or home reveals families arranged in their own practical manner -- not according to a racially defined rule. Beyond the ever abstract wish for "more money" (which is not a uniquely black desire), none of the residents seem to share any goals that would serve to shape a unique cultural identity. From New York to California, black neighborhoods are typically mere conglomerations of black strangers, not "communities".

The reason for this state of affairs might lay in the hand-wringing idea that the American black identity, when we view it fully, has never been based on much more than a shared striving against and contempt for oppression. Today, that oppression has been placed in check or has grown more sophisticated in its approach -- whichever you like. It nevertheless stands that the old form of oppression -- which blackness relied upon -- is gone and it follows that the old black identity has left the party with it.

It used to be enough to say that blackness only required the necessary melanin and a strong belief in "the fight for more rights for niggas". How complicated things have become.

(Originally posted 10/25/2011)

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"The Hallway" of "Post-Modern" Western Life

2015-10-04T01:10:00.000-04:00

The Hallway is an interesting art exhibit by [Miranda July] that (to me) seems to sum up the western [existential dilemma] in a nutshell. I also saw Spike Lee's "Passing Strange" recently and it made me think about many of these same topics. I've noticed that many of these conversations discuss this "existential dilemma" in the context of the individual on this linear road into a dark unknown future. That seems problematic to me. We. Must. Es-cape. This. lol. What also seems problematic to me though, is to try and escape an individualistic existential dilemma with more individualism.

Speaking of that hallway, my homegirl got me tickets to see Mark "Stew" Stewart and Spike Lee's "Passing Strange" [watch it here] at the IFC Film Center. A hit Broadway musical, Spike Lee was tapped to produce and direct a film-capture version of the play for (poorer) movie theatre audiences (and, perhaps, longevity's sake). The title "Passing Strange" comes from Shakespeare's 1603 play "Othello, the Moor of Venice". In the play, Othello famously says: "My story being done/ She gave me for my pains a world of sighs/ She swore, in faith 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange/ 'Twas pitiful. 'twas wondrous pitiful/ She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd/ That heaven had made her such a man. She thanked me,/ And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,/ I should but teach him how to tell my story,/ And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake:/ She loved me for the dangers I had passed,/ And I loved her, that she did pity them." -Othello, the Moor of Venice, act 1, scene 3, lines 158–163 A quite depressing tale of a black man in a white man's dilemma, with a white woman as the love of his life, when I read this in high school it never felt relevant to me. Obviously, to Mark "Stew" Stewart it was highly relevant, because this play is loosely based on him. Except, perfectly non-coincidentally, the race element is muted by the fact that all the actors have black skin -- even the women the main character encounters in Amsterdam and Germany. Post-black, indeed; I guess. The story was moving though and I actually found myself tearing up toward the end; until I thought about all the ways that this long depressing journey isn't about me. What I came in thinking was a story about black folks, and therefore relevant and perhaps instructional for me, ended up a story about a man, "passing as black", who has purchased in full the dilemma of this solitary "hallway", as all his own. Does he become depressed? Or does he simplify it to the point of amusement? Probably not ironically, it's like a musical rendition of America's path to electing a black president, a long time late, to lead itself out of it's own "manifest destiny". And we continue to wonder why Americans are so angry and confused. Aside from merely enjoying it on a superficial level (say, how I might watch "The Office" on NBC now and then), the only lesson I can take away from this film is to remember to not get so caught up in the complexities of this existentialist "woe is me-ism", that I no longer realize that this "question" ought to be irrelevant to me in the first place. This character's journey takes place in a reality that has enslaved him, and he thinks he can escape it by exploring it further as an individual "pioneer" within it. But choosing to be a pioneer within a reality enslaving you seems to be an acceptance of your enslavement. Like "The Hallway", what seems problematic to me in all of this mind-fuc*ery, is that the best answer some folks have is to continue trying to escape an individualistic existential dilemma with more individualist pioneering. Where is the conversation with the past? How lost is this character? How blind, that he never once in the play stops to look back, or even to his left or right to really connect with who is with him on this journey? Even if he did choose to try and pioneer, why the solitude? Aside from his ghostly mother whispering, from within his own subconscious, to him from half way across the world (reminiscent of white kids backpacking through Europe as college graduation gifts), not once do we see him pick up a book, or stop to ask genuine advice of someone more remembering of the past than him. And at no point in the second act is this failure even suggested as a mistake to be avoided. No lessons here from the cyclical nature of time, just linear pushing on. "Do you", seems to be the message, because in the end every choice you made is "alright"; after all, it's the only choice you could have made. And so, admittedly, I was tearing up towards the end of this sad story. Feeling sorry for the character and wondering if my life too would end up as this elementary choice of perception. But then I choked up them tears that were welling up in a sympathetic connection to this poor boy's story, because something felt strange -- this doesn't feel right to me. This doesn't seem instructional, this wallowing, this swallowing and suppressing, this pioneering arrogance. It all seems so childish. And I want to grow up so bad. I don't think it's that we are not to be individuals, or pioneers. But should we be defined totally as such? Yes, I am responsible for my own freedom. But it just seems wise and right to ask, who before me has been free? {liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature} We're a human development centered cooperative, producing in part through the generous and faithful contributions of our North Star members. Choose your membership: Annual ($36), Monthly ($3), ($5), ($10), ($15), ($30), ($70), ($200), ($500), ($1000).