First Du Bois got it all wrong, waxed all poetic in error, and then complacently proclaimed:
"The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line."
And then others came along and said Du Bois was even more prescient than he himself could have known. The problem, said the new philosophers, of not only the 20th century but also the 21st and presumably the 22nd century will still be the problem of the color-line.
They too, like their intellectual ancestor, were wrong.
The central problem of all times has always been the problem of the greed-line. The desire of the few to grab the all at the expense of the many in defiance of our shared humanity. The insatiable appetites of the diseased minority to organize their sense of Self around stealing from the Others...
In other ages before our own, the potential of this problem to toss our wills to sing common human songs has always been there, staring like the ghost from haunted dreamscapes. But we survived because no one made a religion/ideology/morality/God of human greed. The banter of cautionary tales always stood, sometimes precariously but always determinedly against hordes of greedy bastards supposedly acting out the will of God...
Until. Well, until we came up with the wonderful idea that for "everyone" to be happy, some have to become slaves, others cleaned out, and the rest transformed into succulent zombies begging the varied appetites of those who tossed Titans off Olympus and assumed God-shapes/Greed-shapes.
The same pseudo-heroes who arrogantly declared the end of history because somehow their banker friends suddenly found themselves in "unassailable" positions of power and their politician acolytes could order all kinds of incessant freedom wars to kill and kill and kill again in the name of some "democracies" only they in their exalted follies could understand.
Those who created the conflagrations of Babylon and asked for the keys to Persia and then installed Blackface to do PR for their increased appetite for blood their bloodlust I say their deathwish upon all of us including themselves except that they did not could not know just how stupid they were...
But we woke up one day and remembered the ancient wisdom of our ancestors that say that you do not burn communal barns in order to satiate single hungers...
You do not burn our collective homestead just because you want to live in a mansion in Hollywood in Beverly Hills on the Moon at wherever else your sick mindscape has drawn as your manifest destiny of now
And our children marched on to New York to Paris London to Rome to Toronto to Hamilton
And asked questions that Mayor Bloomberg Sarkozy Cameron Berlusconi Harper said could not should not be asked
Questions about why it is that some bleed the all and get bailed-rewarded so that more would bleed all over again
Questions about why we want to live in dignity but those who claim they are appointed by God on our behalves insist that our fate should be only in the gutters looking into the ravines
And while they asked these questions the blood of our kinsfolk in Tripoli in Benghazi in Sirte in Mogadishu in Abidjan in Baghdad in Kabul cried out:
One of these days the poor will have nothing left to eat but the rich but the thieving rich but the evil rich
And oh, the Lord God of the harvest shall endow the cannibalistic poor with one hell of a sickle
For the harvest of the few fed fat on our fees and fears the sumptuous dinner of the rich that must die
And as Du Bois himself would have howled if he were not caught up in small details,
The problem of the 21st century is the problem of the greed-line
And we will have some exciting skirmishes yet.
Howl howl the darkening night howl howl howl the coming bloodbath!!
Sunday, 16 October 2011
Saturday, 23 July 2011
Of Wooden Indians, Forgiving Colonisers, and Why We Don't a Give an "F"
Somewhere tucked in the maelstrom of BBC's perpetually self-righteous propaganda wars against the Zimbabwean and by extension African people is a video item this week about a "Zimbabwean man [who] forgives men who had beaten him up."
Sad, sad story. Like always. And we savage natives, guilty by association, are supposed to weep for the sins of our cousins and relatives and regret our gargantuan capacity for ingratitude. Ah, that painful word that reminds of all that is wrong with us: ingratitude...
Why not? Just imagine the scenario in which a perfectly innocent man is accosted by a group of strange and strangerly vandals, beaten in a most savage way, and then ejected from a land that he owns by the glorious dictats of an ancien regime of his knowledgeable peer-colonisers. And think of the even more touching dimension: That man can speak, and in his elevated poetry of the soul kind of dialect, he recalls how at the height of all the atrocities perpetrated against him, the only thoughts that came to his mind were drawn from the morally superior words of Jesus who had admonished us to forgive those who ill-use us, etc etc.
What a saint. A holy saint. A perfectly holy saint whose matyrdom, when it is finally confirmed, would provide sanctified material for the most holy of shrines for sad generations yet unborn. Posterity...hmm.
And history is on his side, too. Concerning Zimbabwe, everything was done in the proper manner and in the proper spirit.
After all, had Cecil Rhodes not shown enough good faith by signing an agreement with Lobengula? Had the great white inheritors-of-Zimbabwe-by-the-will-of-god not given enough trinkets and guns and alcohol to the local "rulers" to make the stealing of Zimbabwe by a handful of refugees from Europe the most convenient of transitions in all of modern history?
...and on, and on, and on. But my rebellious spirit could just not soar so holily on Christ's elevated words, or the creative use to which this modern-day buccaneer cum soldier of the cross was putting them. Rather, my mind strayed to that grey zone of unmentionable factoids. There, I picked scattered remnants of a voice from not so long ago:
I was the red man
I was proud , I was strong
You were the white man
And you stole away my home....
You were the white man
And you drove me in the ground...
...I am a wooden Indian
Standing silent in the rain
Swear BY my grandfather's father
We're GONNA rise again...
Na na na....nah, nah, nah, nah, nah...the glorious words of Jesus and how he spoke about forgiving enemies might mean a lot to self-righteous twerps intent on scoring cheap propaganda points on BBC. But, with due apologies to those who have sensitive spirits, etc., those words don't mean shit to men and women whose lands and inheritance were stolen in broad daylight and given to bandits whose only god was/is greed. And no matter how much pretense is set up around it via the smooth-talk of modern noise-multipliers such as the BBC, the attitude of the disinherited would not change until the right thing is done.
Contrary to what many people with short memories would like to believe, Ben Freeth and his father-in-law can do a lot better than join up with some hypocritical concoctors of imperial nostalgia over at BBC. And even if they do, their rantings about kingdoms-gone-so-soon won't, with due apologies again to those with sensitive spirits, mean shit.
Like a famous wise man once said, "there is an old saying in Tennessee, I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee...that says, fool me once, shame on...shame on you...Fool me...you can't get fooled again."
There is another, similar saying in Zimbabwe. Or Kenya. Or South Africa. Maybe in Namibia...or Libya. It's a swear by a grandfather's father's name that roughly translates as: we simply don't give a fuck about holy charlatans!!
Sad, sad story. Like always. And we savage natives, guilty by association, are supposed to weep for the sins of our cousins and relatives and regret our gargantuan capacity for ingratitude. Ah, that painful word that reminds of all that is wrong with us: ingratitude...
Why not? Just imagine the scenario in which a perfectly innocent man is accosted by a group of strange and strangerly vandals, beaten in a most savage way, and then ejected from a land that he owns by the glorious dictats of an ancien regime of his knowledgeable peer-colonisers. And think of the even more touching dimension: That man can speak, and in his elevated poetry of the soul kind of dialect, he recalls how at the height of all the atrocities perpetrated against him, the only thoughts that came to his mind were drawn from the morally superior words of Jesus who had admonished us to forgive those who ill-use us, etc etc.
What a saint. A holy saint. A perfectly holy saint whose matyrdom, when it is finally confirmed, would provide sanctified material for the most holy of shrines for sad generations yet unborn. Posterity...hmm.
And history is on his side, too. Concerning Zimbabwe, everything was done in the proper manner and in the proper spirit.
After all, had Cecil Rhodes not shown enough good faith by signing an agreement with Lobengula? Had the great white inheritors-of-Zimbabwe-by-the-will-of-god not given enough trinkets and guns and alcohol to the local "rulers" to make the stealing of Zimbabwe by a handful of refugees from Europe the most convenient of transitions in all of modern history?
...and on, and on, and on. But my rebellious spirit could just not soar so holily on Christ's elevated words, or the creative use to which this modern-day buccaneer cum soldier of the cross was putting them. Rather, my mind strayed to that grey zone of unmentionable factoids. There, I picked scattered remnants of a voice from not so long ago:
I was the red man
I was proud , I was strong
You were the white man
And you stole away my home....
You were the white man
And you drove me in the ground...
...I am a wooden Indian
Standing silent in the rain
Swear BY my grandfather's father
We're GONNA rise again...
Na na na....nah, nah, nah, nah, nah...the glorious words of Jesus and how he spoke about forgiving enemies might mean a lot to self-righteous twerps intent on scoring cheap propaganda points on BBC. But, with due apologies to those who have sensitive spirits, etc., those words don't mean shit to men and women whose lands and inheritance were stolen in broad daylight and given to bandits whose only god was/is greed. And no matter how much pretense is set up around it via the smooth-talk of modern noise-multipliers such as the BBC, the attitude of the disinherited would not change until the right thing is done.
Contrary to what many people with short memories would like to believe, Ben Freeth and his father-in-law can do a lot better than join up with some hypocritical concoctors of imperial nostalgia over at BBC. And even if they do, their rantings about kingdoms-gone-so-soon won't, with due apologies again to those with sensitive spirits, mean shit.
Like a famous wise man once said, "there is an old saying in Tennessee, I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee...that says, fool me once, shame on...shame on you...Fool me...you can't get fooled again."
There is another, similar saying in Zimbabwe. Or Kenya. Or South Africa. Maybe in Namibia...or Libya. It's a swear by a grandfather's father's name that roughly translates as: we simply don't give a fuck about holy charlatans!!
Wednesday, 13 July 2011
Atukwei Okai: A Tender Homage to Noisy Poetry
Part Two
Was it the drum that called you or it was you who called the drum? One attempts to answer that and finds the inevitable gap that clouds all searches for antecedents of genius. Maybe in this case as well as that other well known one, there were no calls. Not from either side. No calls. No voices. No supernatural portents.
But find each other you did. The drum and you. You and the drum. The ancestrallogic of the ancestraldrum in the high tide of Romanticism in Blackface.
For you came to us at a time when all poetry, for us neo-Euro-bourgeoisie of the Anglophone West African species, had to go through the clearing houses of Chaucer-Shakespeare-Marlowe-Pope-Wordsworth-Keats-Browning-Hardy ad infinitum to weave comedic strains of inane parrot-vogues that not even we ourselves would give a second hearing to.
And while we jested our offbeat iambic pentameters and imbecilic hexameters in the marketplace of others looking for sympathetic ears to buy our songs-dead-at-birth, it was you the iconoclast from Ga Mashie who burst on our stage with the "shocking" reminder that our ancestors did not talk in the esoteric accent of foreign coinages to rouse the Asante bush to the full stature of its erotic cheer. No, you said, even in the midnight of high betrayal, when our sons and daughters were sardined off to unnameable places to serve unnameable gods of unnameable morals, even those sons and daughters lost in alien soils trying to come to terms with life without home moorings, even those sons and daughters did not forget the primal ancestral birthcordial watu wazuri drums...
The wail of the guitar might be fine for Andalusian soils soaked with Lorcaian blood, but over here in Africa, we start with the drums.
We start with the drums in order to give voice to authentic Afro-discourse in this world that we live in it where the quantum physics of existential inequality blows up the dorkordiki bowl of human sanity...we start with the drums we start with drums we start with the drums.
For drums make noise and in this world that we live in it where the quantum physics of existential inequality blows up the dorkordiki bowl of human sanity, one needs to make noise in order to let it be known that we are just taking our time to make sure that it is you who is standing on our testicles that it is you who is squeezing our existential testicles that it is you who is trying to bracket our life-brockos...
Those are words you spoke and then you started with the drums you started with the noise of the drums even when it was clear the special branch our knowledgeable dons thought your visions were coming from a country with which our masters in the West were not on ayeekoo terms...
But did you care?
You returned you returned from the doldrums you returned with conundrums you returned with soles burnt upon coals you returned
You returned manuring our memories into a fertile remembrance of things recent and past
You returned and succeeded in re-entering the realm of the Old Odomankoma Okyerema against all the 666 barricades they set up against you all the 999 fake smiles before the stones they flung at you...
You started with the drums and swore your oath against all those who throw stones at us. We emaciated besieged ravaged uncertain returnees heard your first wail as though it were cool water to the parched palate of the droughted desert:
My brothers
My people
My brothers
I am sought,
I am sought because
When you want to starve
the ocean
You paralyze
its source
the river
And who were you? Okai, who were you in the incarnation that called us back to the life of the noisy living drums?
You were the fontomfrom!
Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!
You are the fontomfrom.
Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!
Fontomfrom! The noise of the drums! Fontomfrom! The sense of nonsense! Fontomfrom! The sword of Nat Turner! Fontomfrom! The wireless phone of our ancestors! Fontomfrom! The mobile networks of our forests! Fontomfrom!
You began with the drums and the drums began with Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!!
Was it the drum that called you or it was you who called the drum? One attempts to answer that and finds the inevitable gap that clouds all searches for antecedents of genius. Maybe in this case as well as that other well known one, there were no calls. Not from either side. No calls. No voices. No supernatural portents.
But find each other you did. The drum and you. You and the drum. The ancestrallogic of the ancestraldrum in the high tide of Romanticism in Blackface.
For you came to us at a time when all poetry, for us neo-Euro-bourgeoisie of the Anglophone West African species, had to go through the clearing houses of Chaucer-Shakespeare-Marlowe-Pope-Wordsworth-Keats-Browning-Hardy ad infinitum to weave comedic strains of inane parrot-vogues that not even we ourselves would give a second hearing to.
And while we jested our offbeat iambic pentameters and imbecilic hexameters in the marketplace of others looking for sympathetic ears to buy our songs-dead-at-birth, it was you the iconoclast from Ga Mashie who burst on our stage with the "shocking" reminder that our ancestors did not talk in the esoteric accent of foreign coinages to rouse the Asante bush to the full stature of its erotic cheer. No, you said, even in the midnight of high betrayal, when our sons and daughters were sardined off to unnameable places to serve unnameable gods of unnameable morals, even those sons and daughters lost in alien soils trying to come to terms with life without home moorings, even those sons and daughters did not forget the primal ancestral birthcordial watu wazuri drums...
The wail of the guitar might be fine for Andalusian soils soaked with Lorcaian blood, but over here in Africa, we start with the drums.
We start with the drums in order to give voice to authentic Afro-discourse in this world that we live in it where the quantum physics of existential inequality blows up the dorkordiki bowl of human sanity...we start with the drums we start with drums we start with the drums.
For drums make noise and in this world that we live in it where the quantum physics of existential inequality blows up the dorkordiki bowl of human sanity, one needs to make noise in order to let it be known that we are just taking our time to make sure that it is you who is standing on our testicles that it is you who is squeezing our existential testicles that it is you who is trying to bracket our life-brockos...
Those are words you spoke and then you started with the drums you started with the noise of the drums even when it was clear the special branch our knowledgeable dons thought your visions were coming from a country with which our masters in the West were not on ayeekoo terms...
But did you care?
You returned you returned from the doldrums you returned with conundrums you returned with soles burnt upon coals you returned
You returned manuring our memories into a fertile remembrance of things recent and past
You returned and succeeded in re-entering the realm of the Old Odomankoma Okyerema against all the 666 barricades they set up against you all the 999 fake smiles before the stones they flung at you...
You started with the drums and swore your oath against all those who throw stones at us. We emaciated besieged ravaged uncertain returnees heard your first wail as though it were cool water to the parched palate of the droughted desert:
My brothers
My people
My brothers
I am sought,
I am sought because
When you want to starve
the ocean
You paralyze
its source
the river
And who were you? Okai, who were you in the incarnation that called us back to the life of the noisy living drums?
You were the fontomfrom!
Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!
You are the fontomfrom.
Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!
Fontomfrom! The noise of the drums! Fontomfrom! The sense of nonsense! Fontomfrom! The sword of Nat Turner! Fontomfrom! The wireless phone of our ancestors! Fontomfrom! The mobile networks of our forests! Fontomfrom!
You began with the drums and the drums began with Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!!
Monday, 11 July 2011
Atukwei Okai: A Tender Homage to Noisy Poetry
| Atukwei Okai |
The cry of the fontomfrom wakes me from a studied slumber as I steady myself to pay homage to our own version of what Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg could well have been if only they had worked a bit harder.
Fontomfrom. I throway salute. Fontomfrom. Fontomfrom.
Atukwei Okai is certainly not meat for milk teeth. Even though meat will certainly destroy milk teeth easily. I will take my time because the man who specializes on killing people for a living, executioner style, may not take kindly to being flayed without appropriate preambles.
Okai's rumbunctious swagger alone would compel rumblings in the tell-tale heart. His verbose braggadocio would never spare the silent witness. And when his fontomfrom begins to wail begins to wag begins to call arms to war, one knows that it is time to re-member the most colourful Ghanaian and African poet of the 20th century.
So I will re-member him tonight. And tomorrow. And the day after. But I will take my time. After all, when we stage our traditional epics, we take our time. When we play out our Ozidi sagas, we don't rush out things to shatter the miracles embedded in the tortoise crawl in the snail walk. We take our time we take our days we prate we stay our speed in slow paced imitation of the royal laze because we know when a chief stops a procession to do his thing, it is not for mere mortals to start asking infantile questions about schedules/timelines/deadlines. So I will take my time with this one.
This is just the beginning. Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!
Somebody's newspaper salesboy. Fontomfrom!
Somebody's rapper before hip-hop came along. Fontomfrom!
Somebody's love-lorn Rosimaya cuckold. Fontomfrom!
Somebody's bula-matari on ayekoo terms with too many gifts so many gifts. Fontomfrom!
Somebody's pseudo-Soyinka as good as the Nobel Laureate himself, Fontomfrom!
Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!
Part Two
Was it the drum that called you or it was you who called the drum? One attempts to answer that and finds the inevitable gap that clouds all searches for antecedents of genius. Maybe in this case as well as that other well known one, there were no calls. Not from either side. No calls. No voices. No supernatural portents.
But find each other you did. The drum and you. You and the drum. The ancestrallogic of the ancestraldrum in the high tide of Romanticism in Blackface.
For you came to us at a time when all poetry, for us neo-Euro-bourgeoisie of the Anglophone West African species, had to go through the clearing houses of Chaucer-Shakespeare-Marlowe-Pope-Wordsworth-Keats-Browning-Hardy ad infinitum to weave comedic strains of inane parrot-vogues that not even we ourselves would give a second listening to.
And while we jested our offbeat iambic pentameters and imbecilic hexameters in the marketplace of others looking for sympathetic ears to buy our songs-dead-at-birth, it was you the iconoclast from Ga Mashie who burst on our stage with the shocking reminder that our ancestors did not talk in the esoteric accent of foreign coinages to rouse the Asante bush to the full stature of its erotic cheer. No, you said, even in the midnight of high betrayal, when our sons and daughters were sardined off to unnameable places to serve unnameable gods of unnameable morals, even those sons and daughters lost in alien soils trying to come to terms with life without home moorings, even those sons and daughters did not forget the primal ancestral birthcordial watu wazuri drums...
The wail of the guitar might be fine for Andalusian soils soaked with Lorcaian blood, but over here in Africa, we start with the drums.
We start with the drums in order to give voice to authentic Afro-discourse in this world that we live in it where the quantum physics of existential inequality blows up the dorkordiki bowl of human sanity...we start with the drums we start with drums we start with the drums.
For drums make noise and in this world that we live in it where the quantum physics of existential inequality blows up the dorkordiki bowl of human sanity, one needs to make noise in order to let it be known that we are just taking our time to make sure that it is you who is standing on our testicles that it is you who is squeezing our existential testicles that it is you who is trying to bracket our life-brockos...
Those are words you spoke and then you started with the drums you started with the noise of the drums even when it was clear the special branch our knowledgeable dons thought your visions were coming from a country with which our masters in the West were not on ayeekoo terms...
But did you care?
You returned you returned from the doldrums you returned with conundrums you returned with soles burnt upon coals you returned
You returned manuring your memories into a fertile remembrance of things recent and past
You returned and succeeded in re-entering the realm of the Old Odomankoma Okyerema against all the 666 barricades they set up against you all the 999 fake smiles before the stones they flung at you...
You started with the drums and swore your oath against all those who throw stones at us. We emaciated besieged ravaged uncertain returnees heard your first wail as though it were cool water to the parched palate of the droughted desert:
My brothers
My people
My brothers
I am sought,
I am sought because
When you want to starve
the ocean
You paralyze
its source
the river
And who were you? Okai, who were you in the incarnation that called us back to the life of the noisy living drums?
You were the fontomfrom!
Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!
You are the fontomfrom.
Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!
Fontomfrom! The noise of the drums! Fontomfrom! The sense of nonsense! Fontomfrom! The sword of Nat Turner! Fontomfrom! The wireless phone of our ancestors! Fontomfrom! The mobile networks of our forests! Fontomfrom!
You began with the drums and the drums began with Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!!
Sunday, 10 July 2011
Merari's Merry Spirit Merges With the Stars
 |
| Merari Alomele |
So we will cultivate some silence here. But we cannot pretend to suddenly unknow a kinsman because of the fear of powerful Ones who have robbed us in broad daylight.
After all, Merari was the poet-cantor of our village who sang many laughters into our pained nights and taught us that a man may laugh at any fate that befalls him and by laughing transcend his fate.
Merari was the palaverian who delayed our foolish outbursts long enough to transform them into self-mockeries and in-bursts that enriched our often colorless lives.
Merari was the daredevil who woke up early in the morning with a gong in his hands and used words as bullets in his flute-mouth, piping away at kings and queens who shat into our village streams and thought they could get away with it because we had forgotten the fundamentals of talk-back. And he made us share in the collective joy of laughing at the caricatured fools.
Merari was a lot other things to us. We must know because he was one of us, was born among us and grew among us. We lived with him and saw him mount the stage under the village tree times without number to do the dance of our several selves.
For a man like that, and here we must dare the gods themselves and commit hubris if needs be, for a man like that, why must a time like this be imposed as the period of exit into a world whose accountability to us the living still lies unresolved?
Perhaps heaven has lost all sense of humour, and to placate the gaping needs of Divinities for laughter, somebody went and recommended our village treasure our Sikaman laugh-yarn king.
Our loss, then, becomes a monumental gain for those beyond. And while that is little consolation, we will remember the man whose brief passage on the stage of life expanded our spirits so much and taught us to fall in love with ourselves again and again.
Maybe we made a mistake in the process by falling in love with him too; people like Merari are the tantalizing gifts of the gods who must go back to the Givers sooner than we are willing to let them go.
He now belongs where he first came from. He belongs to the Ancestors. Merari now belongs to the Ages. I say Merari's spirit has now properly married the Stars.
And suddenly, the world robbed of him seems to be a place for midgets. But at least we can look up to where he's gone while we take pride in the living words he left behind.
Big Brother Merari, I am finally going to do the search for the source of your name although I am sorry to say, comrade, I won't be able to report my findings to you over at the New Times Corporation.
Meanwhile, blewuuuuuuuuuu. Efoga blewuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!
Rudimental Ruminations Against Rumours of Ruination
I sang a sonorous sorrow song for snivelling Solo. And then breathed the lilt of life into his cancer-ed bones...
Shall I then not drag your private fear into the public gaze?
Shall I then not lift veils off your fears of the dying of the day?
Shall I not break through the cordons of conventional proprieties
And cry your familiar pain into the complacent noise of the vulgar market place?
Trainee, I got your heart-beat soul-thirst spirit-zeal letter today
And in it I also read your multiple doubts in streaks of multiple red signals
I read of the dread of myriad moons casting dreary shadows on your day-dreams
I read of the perpetual feel of the underdog lid on top of your reluctant head
I read/felt it all because it is what we all know in the insistent ardour of this kill-dreams space. What we all must wake up to on Monday Morning and go to sleep with on Sunday Sundown. The booming blasts of the muezzins of impossible-lore. The cacophonous melange of die-quick prophesies from prophets of doom who have given up on life and embraced death-wish as their only salvation from challenges that the human spirit must rise to must loft on must transcend finally...
Familiar strains Trainee familiar strains of the debilitating masterpieces of darkrooms of fear/doubt/death
Familiar strains oh Trainee familiar strains because I too have heard them before I too hear them everyday I too will hear them tomorrow
Familiar strains Trainee familiar strains because they seek to kill the primal songs daemonic songs destiny songs that we must sing
Familiar songs Trainee familar songs because they are ubiquitous roadblocks that insist we carry the burdens of our yes-we-cans into the eerie silences of sinister cemeteries...
But Trainee oh my Trainee of the Nights that rock the hope-boat
It is not true it is not true what they say about underdogs whose villained voices must stray away from the mellifluent rhymes of greatness
It is not true it is not true what they say about of all of us being lost generations whose voices scatter untracked like lost planets lost from the Milky Way
It is not true Trainee it is not true in spite of all that a thousand naysayers in their hallowed follies pronounce
So go out there and sing and dance and fly and touch your skies
You go out there and dream of days of drudgery and nights of passion and victories that must follow
Go out and shout over and over I know in my heart I can do it I know in my heart I can do it...
Benevolences of our universe will echo you we know in our hearts you can do it...you can do it...do it...
And then you will do it you will do it you will surely against all the odds do it do it do it
I wrote this for you, Trainee, because I too believe in my heart that you can do it/you will do it.
Shall I then not drag your private fear into the public gaze?
Shall I then not lift veils off your fears of the dying of the day?
Shall I not break through the cordons of conventional proprieties
And cry your familiar pain into the complacent noise of the vulgar market place?
Trainee, I got your heart-beat soul-thirst spirit-zeal letter today
And in it I also read your multiple doubts in streaks of multiple red signals
I read of the dread of myriad moons casting dreary shadows on your day-dreams
I read of the perpetual feel of the underdog lid on top of your reluctant head
I read/felt it all because it is what we all know in the insistent ardour of this kill-dreams space. What we all must wake up to on Monday Morning and go to sleep with on Sunday Sundown. The booming blasts of the muezzins of impossible-lore. The cacophonous melange of die-quick prophesies from prophets of doom who have given up on life and embraced death-wish as their only salvation from challenges that the human spirit must rise to must loft on must transcend finally...
Familiar strains Trainee familiar strains of the debilitating masterpieces of darkrooms of fear/doubt/death
Familiar strains oh Trainee familiar strains because I too have heard them before I too hear them everyday I too will hear them tomorrow
Familiar strains Trainee familiar strains because they seek to kill the primal songs daemonic songs destiny songs that we must sing
Familiar songs Trainee familar songs because they are ubiquitous roadblocks that insist we carry the burdens of our yes-we-cans into the eerie silences of sinister cemeteries...
But Trainee oh my Trainee of the Nights that rock the hope-boat
It is not true it is not true what they say about underdogs whose villained voices must stray away from the mellifluent rhymes of greatness
It is not true it is not true what they say about of all of us being lost generations whose voices scatter untracked like lost planets lost from the Milky Way
It is not true Trainee it is not true in spite of all that a thousand naysayers in their hallowed follies pronounce
So go out there and sing and dance and fly and touch your skies
You go out there and dream of days of drudgery and nights of passion and victories that must follow
Go out and shout over and over I know in my heart I can do it I know in my heart I can do it...
Benevolences of our universe will echo you we know in our hearts you can do it...you can do it...do it...
And then you will do it you will do it you will surely against all the odds do it do it do it
I wrote this for you, Trainee, because I too believe in my heart that you can do it/you will do it.
Tuesday, 5 July 2011
Tribal Time-warps and Morbid Melancholies
From all indications, my newly discovered discipline and desire to keep ramping up and broadcasting--I have a specifically agricultural image in mind here-- the miscellanea from from my besieged pabulum ran into serious trouble these past seven days or so.
I have serious excuses to mollify the most implacable of critics who would want to call me out on a charge unkept. But, he-he-he! I won't share those excuses. At least, not for a while.
Something else has been bothering me and has taken up most of my time in the past week. The complacent base of my easy/happy assumptions about my neighbours ran into a devastatingly negative decalage last week when one of them walked up to me and told me, point-blank: "Look, I don't like you. I don't like people like you." Just like that. Right in the heart of Accra, Ghana c/o God's Own Green Earth.
"If you were this player, what would you do?" I had read this question somewhere in a now defunct newspaper, The Soccer Scene, in 1986 just on the verge of the Mexican-hosted World Cup when a player called Jose Toure, one of the key performers for the Blue Cocks of France, sustained an injury and was forced off a team that went into the tournament as number one favorite and eventually ended up with a fourth place finish that disappointed a lot of neutrals.
Now, you would ask: What has that got to do with anything? Well, I am coming right along to that: I fancied myself as a kind of top player for the post-ethnic human sensibility team, you know, a kind of Jose Toure with enough acrobatic gestures to qualify me as a diplomatic Maradona, or something equally cool enough along those lines. And I thought I was coasting right along towards my own fiesta universalia until my neighbour you-know-whom walked along, punctured my idealistic balloons, and sent me to the back-of-melancholic-beyond to revisit morbid mutterings I thought I/we had left a long time ago.
For my neighbour was none but the same old face of the trib(e)/al/ist/ic champion who thinks-- I am more tempted to believe you can't think these things, you only need a thick, savage dot-head to repeat them every time your stupidiasis starts acting up, but let's stick to the t-word, for lack of a better--that I deserve the soul-burning excoriations of the old savage sensibilities that marks the man on the other side of the fence as the enemy, the one bad "thing" without whom the world would be perfect. I was, for her, the lingering symbol of that for whom she and her companeros dunder-heados needed to constantly write/rewrite/revise/act out their own Mein Kampfs as a prelude to the staging of their final solutions, too.
Now, having spoken in round-aboutish manner so far, let me come to the main point of this evening's ramble.
My neighbour's Stonehenge-shaped message, in simple terms, was that I belong to the "wrong" tribe.
In this age.
In this time.
In this place.
In our Africa of the post-traumatic Renaissance.
Oh yes, I think of myself as an African. And I guess part of that has to do with the fact that I have no quarrel with where the Transcendental Force wisely decided for me to set up base and contribute to this contrapuntal melody we call life. But my African-ness grows in the awareness of other people's stories. Stories that are as legitimate as mine; stories whose essential colour in tandem creates the rainbow visual that is our collective heritage. We all, Africans, Asians, Americans, Europeans; we all bring colour to that table. And to come to the place of appreciating those stories, I left the wisdom of the tribal prejudice behind a long time ago. Or I thought I did.
But maybe that kind of worldview is too lofty/too unrealistic. My neigbhour brought that much home to me last week with her all-knowing, prehistoric poise. Her florrid fatuous flatulence about why it is that "your people are trying to take over the country from my people when it has always been that the country belongs to my people and that it was my people who built the empires and ruled the others and created all the history and produce/d all the brainy ones and are known across the world and are chosen by god/God to continue the good works...etc etc etc"
And she added in good prophetic measure: "The war is coming; it is inevitable. The battle lines are drawn, and something would have to give...Some people must be sacrificed to enable these multicultural environment to be sanitized with the univocal truncheon of the savage ideal...We will clean out your people, or drive them into the sea, or out to XXX across the border where they belong..." I could almost see the cockroach accusation not far behind, already solidly formed on the mental horizons of this thick-skulled throw-back to an age of human evolution that we may only refer to in qualified whispers.
I laughed.
Not because I found it funny. What's there to find funny about foolish ideologies that demarcate "chosen people" versus "gentiles" and encourage genocidal fantasies about those "unlucky" to be so chosen? What's there to find funny about nut-case philosophies that invent, calcify, and then sanctify the myopic tribal essence as the be-all and end-all of all existential striving? What's there to find funny about ideas that have produced Apatheid's hell-holes and the German Holocuast in Namibia and Hitler's concentration camps and Rwanda and DR Congo and Liberia and Sudan and so on?
But I laughed. Laughed because on the spur of the moment, I could do no more than that. And also because I found out a long time ago that one could not persuade a sick fanatic based on logical arguments.
So I laughed. And then I thought of Robert Frost, the old New Englander criss-crossing his snowfields debating his birch trees invoking his missed opportunities/roads not taken...Robert Frost... recalling the stone-age savage philosophy that glorifies fences and stereotypical masks the prevent humans from recognizing fellow humans as complemental pieces that enable a more rounded vision of the puzzle of life.
But after laughing, I went back to my room and then fell into a deep depression of the spirit. A morbid melancholic wrestlemania with all the warps and manufactured distortions that hold back the quintessential melody of being...That's where I have been all this while.
Maybe I have shared my good excuse about why this blog took the long leave, after all. But hey, I am back till a better excuse pushes me back into hibernation.
I have serious excuses to mollify the most implacable of critics who would want to call me out on a charge unkept. But, he-he-he! I won't share those excuses. At least, not for a while.
Something else has been bothering me and has taken up most of my time in the past week. The complacent base of my easy/happy assumptions about my neighbours ran into a devastatingly negative decalage last week when one of them walked up to me and told me, point-blank: "Look, I don't like you. I don't like people like you." Just like that. Right in the heart of Accra, Ghana c/o God's Own Green Earth.
"If you were this player, what would you do?" I had read this question somewhere in a now defunct newspaper, The Soccer Scene, in 1986 just on the verge of the Mexican-hosted World Cup when a player called Jose Toure, one of the key performers for the Blue Cocks of France, sustained an injury and was forced off a team that went into the tournament as number one favorite and eventually ended up with a fourth place finish that disappointed a lot of neutrals.
Now, you would ask: What has that got to do with anything? Well, I am coming right along to that: I fancied myself as a kind of top player for the post-ethnic human sensibility team, you know, a kind of Jose Toure with enough acrobatic gestures to qualify me as a diplomatic Maradona, or something equally cool enough along those lines. And I thought I was coasting right along towards my own fiesta universalia until my neighbour you-know-whom walked along, punctured my idealistic balloons, and sent me to the back-of-melancholic-beyond to revisit morbid mutterings I thought I/we had left a long time ago.
For my neighbour was none but the same old face of the trib(e)/al/ist/ic champion who thinks-- I am more tempted to believe you can't think these things, you only need a thick, savage dot-head to repeat them every time your stupidiasis starts acting up, but let's stick to the t-word, for lack of a better--that I deserve the soul-burning excoriations of the old savage sensibilities that marks the man on the other side of the fence as the enemy, the one bad "thing" without whom the world would be perfect. I was, for her, the lingering symbol of that for whom she and her companeros dunder-heados needed to constantly write/rewrite/revise/act out their own Mein Kampfs as a prelude to the staging of their final solutions, too.
Now, having spoken in round-aboutish manner so far, let me come to the main point of this evening's ramble.
My neighbour's Stonehenge-shaped message, in simple terms, was that I belong to the "wrong" tribe.
In this age.
In this time.
In this place.
In our Africa of the post-traumatic Renaissance.
Oh yes, I think of myself as an African. And I guess part of that has to do with the fact that I have no quarrel with where the Transcendental Force wisely decided for me to set up base and contribute to this contrapuntal melody we call life. But my African-ness grows in the awareness of other people's stories. Stories that are as legitimate as mine; stories whose essential colour in tandem creates the rainbow visual that is our collective heritage. We all, Africans, Asians, Americans, Europeans; we all bring colour to that table. And to come to the place of appreciating those stories, I left the wisdom of the tribal prejudice behind a long time ago. Or I thought I did.
But maybe that kind of worldview is too lofty/too unrealistic. My neigbhour brought that much home to me last week with her all-knowing, prehistoric poise. Her florrid fatuous flatulence about why it is that "your people are trying to take over the country from my people when it has always been that the country belongs to my people and that it was my people who built the empires and ruled the others and created all the history and produce/d all the brainy ones and are known across the world and are chosen by god/God to continue the good works...etc etc etc"
And she added in good prophetic measure: "The war is coming; it is inevitable. The battle lines are drawn, and something would have to give...Some people must be sacrificed to enable these multicultural environment to be sanitized with the univocal truncheon of the savage ideal...We will clean out your people, or drive them into the sea, or out to XXX across the border where they belong..." I could almost see the cockroach accusation not far behind, already solidly formed on the mental horizons of this thick-skulled throw-back to an age of human evolution that we may only refer to in qualified whispers.
I laughed.
Not because I found it funny. What's there to find funny about foolish ideologies that demarcate "chosen people" versus "gentiles" and encourage genocidal fantasies about those "unlucky" to be so chosen? What's there to find funny about nut-case philosophies that invent, calcify, and then sanctify the myopic tribal essence as the be-all and end-all of all existential striving? What's there to find funny about ideas that have produced Apatheid's hell-holes and the German Holocuast in Namibia and Hitler's concentration camps and Rwanda and DR Congo and Liberia and Sudan and so on?
But I laughed. Laughed because on the spur of the moment, I could do no more than that. And also because I found out a long time ago that one could not persuade a sick fanatic based on logical arguments.
So I laughed. And then I thought of Robert Frost, the old New Englander criss-crossing his snowfields debating his birch trees invoking his missed opportunities/roads not taken...Robert Frost... recalling the stone-age savage philosophy that glorifies fences and stereotypical masks the prevent humans from recognizing fellow humans as complemental pieces that enable a more rounded vision of the puzzle of life.
But after laughing, I went back to my room and then fell into a deep depression of the spirit. A morbid melancholic wrestlemania with all the warps and manufactured distortions that hold back the quintessential melody of being...That's where I have been all this while.
Maybe I have shared my good excuse about why this blog took the long leave, after all. But hey, I am back till a better excuse pushes me back into hibernation.
Monday, 27 June 2011
Poetic Pastiche on Purulent Pus Day
Some mother's only child scavenging through multiple minefields of murk running mild voice through mounds of mouldy madness,
...And I thought that best minds of a generation destroyed by madness was the howl of yesteryear
...And I thought volcanic magma forming molten galapagos beneath this coney island of the mind is Ferlinghetti's invention fed from verbal diarrheas and imbecile illusions of happiness
...And I thought sunset coming to Sapitwa was Mtshali's trick to while away the prison-house flatulence of old Botha-lore
Till you came and sowed your fetid rancour in my soul...
Now I must return to the other Babel and weep like that other prophet
Who saw the startling vision of rigor mortis and chose to sing eternal elegies to the glories of gangrene:
Expect me my dear would-have-been heartcrest expect me
And then you shall see me coming
Death and death and death. Pain-drops of poisoned chalice preying on life:
The death that killed Kristofa killed Fanon killed Wallace killed Darweesh
Killed Saro-Wiwa killed Marachera killed all of them is killing me now...
Terrible beauty so terribly beautiful so heartbreakingly beautiful
So beautifully heartbreaking the words you spoke tonight my dear and to think I thought you were the best and to think that I thought you deserved celestial platforms celestial angels serenading your celestial essence
So terribly beautiful the way you rendered this latest version of the Judas kiss the Brutus stab the Kotey land the Tsokopi prayer the father love the the Trendy hug the Linda virgin scream the uncle welfare wink
Now I have to bear the solitary burden of a nighttime of multiple orgasms of blood flash-flooding down eye-spaces tearing lashes while the owl of our sub-conscious croons again:
Expect me my dear home-hope expect me
And soon you shall see me coming in the coffin you chose for me
And you placed your virgin lips on my sinful shoulders and spoke your angel tongue into my Sodom bedlam
Pointing innocently to how it is always about the little things that you do...the little things that you do...
Pointing to what must be obvious to me by now: this little thing that you said and broke open the thinly veiled scarified fore of life-old wound
Innocently jostling your own pure pus into my boil-plated knees and sending the searing fire of your carefree slash into my hiccup-ing psyche hiccuping from the many constant wars that each day must bring
And you well know that I have survived this far because I have made the distinction between those who don't matter and those who do and that I have made exceptions for you because I swore you were different you were better than them all
And having made the exceptions for you I went ahead and laughed at those who stand across the walls throwing stones at us horrible stones at us deadly stones at us Judas stones at us cowardly stones at us...
Yet because you were the one so close you leave gashing footprints handprints mouthprints all over even if you scratch only the surface I bruise easily even when I hold my face straight while I ask them to sing
Expect me my dear homesoil expect me
Because you shall see me coming soon and soon and soon
Now I must remove to hell-hole/revise old ode to dunghill/call back saved pains to pay debts of new pricey joys....
Launko/Cavafy/Rilke/Cellini/Darweesh/Akpalu lee!!! It is only another sunset scarring our old woundspots
But what does one do when Sunset comes to Sapitwa?
...And I thought that best minds of a generation destroyed by madness was the howl of yesteryear
...And I thought volcanic magma forming molten galapagos beneath this coney island of the mind is Ferlinghetti's invention fed from verbal diarrheas and imbecile illusions of happiness
...And I thought sunset coming to Sapitwa was Mtshali's trick to while away the prison-house flatulence of old Botha-lore
Till you came and sowed your fetid rancour in my soul...
Now I must return to the other Babel and weep like that other prophet
Who saw the startling vision of rigor mortis and chose to sing eternal elegies to the glories of gangrene:
Expect me my dear would-have-been heartcrest expect me
And then you shall see me coming
Death and death and death. Pain-drops of poisoned chalice preying on life:
The death that killed Kristofa killed Fanon killed Wallace killed Darweesh
Killed Saro-Wiwa killed Marachera killed all of them is killing me now...
Terrible beauty so terribly beautiful so heartbreakingly beautiful
So beautifully heartbreaking the words you spoke tonight my dear and to think I thought you were the best and to think that I thought you deserved celestial platforms celestial angels serenading your celestial essence
So terribly beautiful the way you rendered this latest version of the Judas kiss the Brutus stab the Kotey land the Tsokopi prayer the father love the the Trendy hug the Linda virgin scream the uncle welfare wink
Now I have to bear the solitary burden of a nighttime of multiple orgasms of blood flash-flooding down eye-spaces tearing lashes while the owl of our sub-conscious croons again:
Expect me my dear home-hope expect me
And soon you shall see me coming in the coffin you chose for me
And you placed your virgin lips on my sinful shoulders and spoke your angel tongue into my Sodom bedlam
Pointing innocently to how it is always about the little things that you do...the little things that you do...
Pointing to what must be obvious to me by now: this little thing that you said and broke open the thinly veiled scarified fore of life-old wound
Innocently jostling your own pure pus into my boil-plated knees and sending the searing fire of your carefree slash into my hiccup-ing psyche hiccuping from the many constant wars that each day must bring
And you well know that I have survived this far because I have made the distinction between those who don't matter and those who do and that I have made exceptions for you because I swore you were different you were better than them all
And having made the exceptions for you I went ahead and laughed at those who stand across the walls throwing stones at us horrible stones at us deadly stones at us Judas stones at us cowardly stones at us...
Yet because you were the one so close you leave gashing footprints handprints mouthprints all over even if you scratch only the surface I bruise easily even when I hold my face straight while I ask them to sing
Expect me my dear homesoil expect me
Because you shall see me coming soon and soon and soon
Now I must remove to hell-hole/revise old ode to dunghill/call back saved pains to pay debts of new pricey joys....
Launko/Cavafy/Rilke/Cellini/Darweesh/Akpalu lee!!! It is only another sunset scarring our old woundspots
But what does one do when Sunset comes to Sapitwa?
Sunday, 19 June 2011
Juneteenth...History and Relevance
My first blog-post was labelled 'Juneteenth...Testing,' and I chose that label partly because thoughts of the intersections of social justice and the month of June were heavy on my mind while I was putting it together.
Incidentally, the story of the historical Juneteenth, which falls on today--and tomorrow--is not radically different in its message-lore and significance. If anything, it provides the ultimate template for the kind of thing inspiring my rants on here.
The story is disarming in its simplicity, and yet invigorating in the lessons it provides. In the plate of inspiration it serves. It is obvious that when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation for slaves in September,1862, he did so in the full awareness that he had no power to enforce it. At least, not immediately. Lincoln was in charge of the industrial North, and America's African captives--alias slaves--were predominantly in the agrarian South.
But even if the Proclamation was simply a political sleight of the hand with obvious propaganda and even military benefits, Lincoln was doing something that he himself might probably not have thought of at the time: He was re-instating/re-inscribing/reiterating what has always been right and proper. All men are born free, and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights...Constitutional language plus legalese plus moral prerogatives in addition to refined religious thoughts...all seemed to agree on that...
But how to implement the wonderful proclamation? It was just as hard as the the conundrum of belling the proverbial cat; for the forces ranged against freedom were so strong, and for the short-term they seemed like they were going to dominate forever. In hindsight, we do know, thanks be to all the powers that convene for the good of mankind from time to time, that the pro-slavery party lost out, and it became politically possible to implement the Emancipation Proclamation three odd years after it was issued.
But that was not the end of the story because if it was, Juneteenth would not have become relevant. We are told by many sources that many slaves, because of illiteracy and other historical obstacles, did not even know that the Proclamation had been issued. Perhaps knowing would have helped them to organize, but the fact was, they just did not know and so they went on plodding through cotton fields and breaking their backs for Massa as if nothing had changed.
This is a multi-versioned story with manifestations at multi-points. But the most poignant one, perhaps, is the one that took place at Galveston, Texas on the morning of June 19th, 1865. There, on a hitherto not too prominent balcony, one General Gordon Granger brought the words of life and light to the people who lived under the shadow of darkness and death:
[You] are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United
States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of
property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between
them becomes that between employer and hired lab or.
The rest, as they say, is history. History as Faulkner imagined it: Never past; never dead. Or as Elliot would have it: "The historical sense...[involving] a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence."
For Juneteenth past makes especial sense because of our many brothers and sisters in various chains at the moment. Chains of ignorance, chains of inequality, chains of various forms of injustice. Even the chains of modern day slave masters who would insist, just like their forebears among the slavocracy of the old American South, that there is something natural in the state of things which allows man's inhumanity to man.
And we should, each one of us, see ourselves as Granger obviously did: As messengers for the new dawn in which people across all divides must be able to pursue lives free of all artificial/man-made contortions.
Did Fanon not say "each generation, out of relative obscurity, must discover its mission, and fulfil or betray it"?
Juneteenth speaks the language of Jubilee, but it also says the relevance of Jubilee for all of us will become a reality only if we will take up the message, climb all the metaphorical balconies, and boom above all the noise:
The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me;
Because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek;
He hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the
opening of the prison to them that are bound;
To proclaim the acceptable year...
Incidentally, the story of the historical Juneteenth, which falls on today--and tomorrow--is not radically different in its message-lore and significance. If anything, it provides the ultimate template for the kind of thing inspiring my rants on here.
The story is disarming in its simplicity, and yet invigorating in the lessons it provides. In the plate of inspiration it serves. It is obvious that when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation for slaves in September,1862, he did so in the full awareness that he had no power to enforce it. At least, not immediately. Lincoln was in charge of the industrial North, and America's African captives--alias slaves--were predominantly in the agrarian South.
But even if the Proclamation was simply a political sleight of the hand with obvious propaganda and even military benefits, Lincoln was doing something that he himself might probably not have thought of at the time: He was re-instating/re-inscribing/reiterating what has always been right and proper. All men are born free, and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights...Constitutional language plus legalese plus moral prerogatives in addition to refined religious thoughts...all seemed to agree on that...
But how to implement the wonderful proclamation? It was just as hard as the the conundrum of belling the proverbial cat; for the forces ranged against freedom were so strong, and for the short-term they seemed like they were going to dominate forever. In hindsight, we do know, thanks be to all the powers that convene for the good of mankind from time to time, that the pro-slavery party lost out, and it became politically possible to implement the Emancipation Proclamation three odd years after it was issued.
But that was not the end of the story because if it was, Juneteenth would not have become relevant. We are told by many sources that many slaves, because of illiteracy and other historical obstacles, did not even know that the Proclamation had been issued. Perhaps knowing would have helped them to organize, but the fact was, they just did not know and so they went on plodding through cotton fields and breaking their backs for Massa as if nothing had changed.
This is a multi-versioned story with manifestations at multi-points. But the most poignant one, perhaps, is the one that took place at Galveston, Texas on the morning of June 19th, 1865. There, on a hitherto not too prominent balcony, one General Gordon Granger brought the words of life and light to the people who lived under the shadow of darkness and death:
[You] are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United
States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of
property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between
them becomes that between employer and hired lab or.
The rest, as they say, is history. History as Faulkner imagined it: Never past; never dead. Or as Elliot would have it: "The historical sense...[involving] a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence."
For Juneteenth past makes especial sense because of our many brothers and sisters in various chains at the moment. Chains of ignorance, chains of inequality, chains of various forms of injustice. Even the chains of modern day slave masters who would insist, just like their forebears among the slavocracy of the old American South, that there is something natural in the state of things which allows man's inhumanity to man.
And we should, each one of us, see ourselves as Granger obviously did: As messengers for the new dawn in which people across all divides must be able to pursue lives free of all artificial/man-made contortions.
Did Fanon not say "each generation, out of relative obscurity, must discover its mission, and fulfil or betray it"?
Juneteenth speaks the language of Jubilee, but it also says the relevance of Jubilee for all of us will become a reality only if we will take up the message, climb all the metaphorical balconies, and boom above all the noise:
The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me;
Because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek;
He hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the
opening of the prison to them that are bound;
To proclaim the acceptable year...
...of Jubilee a la Juneteenth!!
Saturday, 18 June 2011
The Eagle's Shadow: A Review
Title: The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World
Author: Mark Hertsgaard
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Year of Publication: 2002
Number of Pages: 259
Do we simply dismiss him as a cheap sensationalist intent on selling books, or do we take him seriously?
Given room to cast a vote, Mark Hertsgaard, the author of The Eagle's Shadow, would certainly go for the serious bit. After all, he suggests strongly that the timing of his book, still being put together when the 9-11 attacks took place, makes it doubly important. Even auspicious.
But exactly what is The Eagle's Shadow about? When I picked it up from the shelf at my local Book Trust shop earlier in the week, the cover didn't strike me as anything but another of the agitprop being churned generously by global Capitalism's fawning praise-singers. The cover design was bad enough. And then there was that Uncle-Samesque guy waving the American flag to make matters worse.
I thought I'd give it a try partly because Nadine Gordimer--herself a serious critic the various manifestations of the cultures of impunity--thought the book was "a strikingly original analysis of the American Dream at home and the ways it haunts the rest of the world." An initial look through the table of contents suggested that all America's sacred cows were up for some serious sniping at, and that too was quite a lure...
All in all, Hertsgaard's exposé on why America fascinates and infuriates the rest of the world did not turn up any major surprises, especially for those of us outside of America. The concentration of material wealth in America especially over the past half century would have reached our ears, even if Hollywood had not done such a wonderful job of over-emphasizing it. After all, American travellers around the world, like the big Texan in Hertsgaard's book, always find interestingly awkward ways to downplay what others have done by reminding us about how they've got "bigger and better ones" in Austin, San Antonio, New York, Chicago, and so on.
Some call it arrogance, but there is also a lot of truth in the author's claims that part of the problem is that those to whom these material acquisitions are flaunted are partly peeved because they do not possess these possessions. Or do not possess them in such abundance.
On a lighter side, perhaps Hertsgaard's odd anecdotal suggestion that there might be some people out there who think Americans are enjoying better--and more democratically spread-out---sex than the rest of us might carry some weight. Who knows?
On a lighter side, perhaps Hertsgaard's odd anecdotal suggestion that there might be some people out there who think Americans are enjoying better--and more democratically spread-out---sex than the rest of us might carry some weight. Who knows?
The book does a decent job of discussing America's excess consumption patterns, the insularity of its citizens--and this is directly related to how much influence that nation wields around the world--, its quixotic religious habits, and finally, its hypocritical stance as far as acknowledging widening internal class differences and the reality of being an empire extremely hostile to democratic values around the world (and increasingly at home). Hertsgaard's mining and deployment of current data out there on the various sub-issues are an added draw.
For instance, while most of us would know or would have met Americans who ask us whether Spain is in Mexico or would ask us to deliver a message to their friends in J'Burg when we get to Accra--since the two happen to be neighbourhoods in the same village called Africa--the hard stat that only 14% percent of Americans have passports, and only a fraction of that ever gets to use them, was juicy. So too were the stats about religious affiliations, publications of books, and the numbers of politicians who have to bow to powerful elements in the Religious Right in order to win power, and the terrible fates of those who dare to run afoul of the same establishment or their allies among the corporate elites.
Obviously, others have done similar work, and packaged it perhaps more eloquently. The greatest value of Hertsgaard's oeuvre is that he provides a timely reminder--circa 2002, but still relevant today-- which, sadly enough, would not be televised on Fox News/CNN/NBC/MSNBC and and the rest of the corporate media where the real America that needs to hear what he has to say lies, and is lied to.
For instance, while most of us would know or would have met Americans who ask us whether Spain is in Mexico or would ask us to deliver a message to their friends in J'Burg when we get to Accra--since the two happen to be neighbourhoods in the same village called Africa--the hard stat that only 14% percent of Americans have passports, and only a fraction of that ever gets to use them, was juicy. So too were the stats about religious affiliations, publications of books, and the numbers of politicians who have to bow to powerful elements in the Religious Right in order to win power, and the terrible fates of those who dare to run afoul of the same establishment or their allies among the corporate elites.
Obviously, others have done similar work, and packaged it perhaps more eloquently. The greatest value of Hertsgaard's oeuvre is that he provides a timely reminder--circa 2002, but still relevant today-- which, sadly enough, would not be televised on Fox News/CNN/NBC/MSNBC and and the rest of the corporate media where the real America that needs to hear what he has to say lies, and is lied to.
But having said that, we should also be willing to critique the major failings of The Eagle's Shadow. Although Hertsgaard occasionally makes passing references to it, he could have done a better job of showcasing the reasons that make people angry with America and its foreign policy decisions.
We of the rest of the world of both the retired terrorist--the author's expression--and ordinary citizen varieties do not appreciate the glories of America so much so often because we feel, with overwhelming hard evidence to support our feelings, that America is abusing its power and influence around the world.
We of the rest of the world of both the retired terrorist--the author's expression--and ordinary citizen varieties do not appreciate the glories of America so much so often because we feel, with overwhelming hard evidence to support our feelings, that America is abusing its power and influence around the world.
It is not Americans' pursuit of their legitimate dreams of happiness, etc. and even their attainment of that that infuriates us. It is the insistence of the American elite classes on building their so-called happiness on the immiseration of others that gets to us.
We don't like it when American politicians go about overthrowing or even killing our legitimately elected leaders.
We don't like it when they empower and strengthen all kinds of dictators who work against us and for the American elites' greedy interests.
We don't like it when they build their military bases on our soils and insist that they need to "destroy our towns and cities in order to save them."
We don't like it when they form criminal cartels like the WTO and use them to bully us into becoming hewers of wood and carters/cutters of stones meant for their edifices of arrogance.
We don't like it when American politicians go about overthrowing or even killing our legitimately elected leaders.
We don't like it when they empower and strengthen all kinds of dictators who work against us and for the American elites' greedy interests.
We don't like it when they build their military bases on our soils and insist that they need to "destroy our towns and cities in order to save them."
We don't like it when they form criminal cartels like the WTO and use them to bully us into becoming hewers of wood and carters/cutters of stones meant for their edifices of arrogance.
We may not be Americans. And some of us don't even want to be. But we think we have a right, like all humans on God's good earth, to pursue happiness. Strange as this may seem/sound, we have our dreams too. And often, American interventionism makes the pursuance of those dreams impossible.
And yes, we don't like it when American leaders who are some of the most illiterate concerning what happens outside the borders of their nation presume to preach to us about whom we should associate with, or how we should be organizing our lives.
And yes, we don't like it when American leaders who are some of the most illiterate concerning what happens outside the borders of their nation presume to preach to us about whom we should associate with, or how we should be organizing our lives.
Those of us in Africa, especially, are thankful to God for the beautiful things that ordinary Americans have been able to do for themselves. We admire the great and wonderful people that they have produced over the years. We read and enjoy/admire their Lincolns/Jeffersons/Paines/Thoreaus/Emersons/Whitmans and Twains/Steinbecks/Ellisons/Steins/Sontags/Dreissers/Faulkners and the longer cavalcade of the so-called minority writers. We admire ordinary Americans' work ethic, and we are happy for the many inventions they have blessed the world with.
But we aspire to add our own bit to the world heritage in our own ways. We don't need the avuncular pretensions of Uncle Sam to make that happen.
But we aspire to add our own bit to the world heritage in our own ways. We don't need the avuncular pretensions of Uncle Sam to make that happen.
Now, to my final verdict on Hertsgaard's book: In spite of all its shortcomings, The Eagle's Shadow is still worth all the two or three hours one may need to put into it because it redirects us to the debate about America's role in the world, and the consequences of that role.
Friday, 17 June 2011
A Friday Homage: Pablo Neruda
Today, I am thinking of Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. The man all of them call Neruda.
I mean Pablo the African who was born in Parral/Chile and took up a Czech pen-name that stuck.
But I shall lack voice and verbal skill. The words of Pablo must not be approached lightly.
Or carelessly.
They must not be play-hoisted on whimsical rant-spots without consultations with the multiple radiances of the multiple celestial forces whom he opened up to.
The gods of songs that filled and flowed through him with all that painful/joyful eloquence.
Maybe I should let the man do his own talking, while we sit back and watch/read:
How many of us, petty mortals, have not lived our lives in perpetual quests for that time/age of which it was said:
I did not know what to say, my mouth
And I, infinitesimal being,
And that freedom-seed, having found a home in his bosom, would turn him into a chanticleer for redemption songs every where the shadows of fetters dared to show up.
In Spain of the fascist storm-tides, against the norm of hypocritical yea-saying, he would set up his untameable/barbaric yawp against what many of us pretend not to see today on the streets of Tripoli/Damascus/Tikrit/Baghdad/Kabul/Istanbul/Mexico City/Medellin/Bogota/La Paz/Mogadishu...He would shake his rattle of uncomfortable words-as-weapons against the hypocritical lie that sought/seeks to veil:
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!
But Neruda could hate so much because he could also love so well. Love so well and paint love so well. In his hands, all the rough diamonds came out sparkling and all the abandoned bundles let out their treasures:
I have named you queen.
There are taller ones than you, taller.
There are purer ones than you, purer.
There are lovelier ones than you, lovelier.
But you are the queen....
And when you appear
all the rivers sound in my body, bells
shake the sky,
and a hymn fills the world.
Only you and I,
only you and I, my love,
listen to it.
He could be desperate too; sending pleading moans into the vertiginous doubtfields...carefully sculpted gems akin to those we maimed on the cusp of our first orgasmic spurts when we neither knew the old/real names for the experience, nor dared to speak too loud lest we make the magic glow go:
Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.
Do not take away the rose,
the lanceflower that you pluck,
the water that suddenly
bursts forth in your joy,
the sudden wave of silver born in you...
And he could be the freaky romantic we dare not speak for at day and yet wet-dream of at night: The wild untamed beast-as-it-should-be-in-love, free from all the fetid/fickle/feckless/foolish moralities that drive us into stale prison-cells of the conventional missionary position and other such boring-dos. The ultimate poet-laureate of Naked-Town and Succulent Breasts and Erect Nipples and Wet Armpits and Heaving Arses and Shining Foreheads and Glistening Teeth and Seductive Eyes. Of the bloody/fiery mutual fuck; the taboo that we must all endure/enjoy at least once...and then again and again and again:
I am the tiger.
I lie in wait for you among leaves
broad as ingots of wet mineral.
The white river grows
beneath the fog. You come.
Naked you submerge.
I wait.
Then in a leap
of fire, blood, teeth,
with a claw slash I tear away
your bosom, your hips.
I drink your blood, I break
your limbs one by one...
Talk again of the untranslatable barbaric yawp. The ultimate prophet of the cannibalistic orgy who compels our admiration. But also a supremely secure man at the height of his powers who knows just how on top of things one could be if one touches the right sacred spots and tickles the right nerves:
Facing you
I am not jealous.
Come with a man
at your back,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your bosom and your feet
come like a river
filled with drowned men
that meets the furious sea,
the eternal foam, the weather.
Bring them all
where I wait for you:
we shall always be alone,
we shall always be, you and I,
alone upon the earth
to begin life
Alone. Alone with the Stars. Alone with the Celestial Fires that forced their blazes through his pores and made him the timeless/restless chanteur of joys/hopes/fears/desires we still have with us aplenty.
And as he loved so much, let his beloved Matilde Urrutia have the final say on the final journey he made in order to join the stars/oceans/constellations/divinities he sang so well:
As we pass the streets, people pour out from them and join the procession. Military vehicles appear carrying soldiers who have their machine guns pointed at us. But they hold back; they only want to scare us. It doesn't work. At every turn, more and more people join the procession and they raise their voice together, shouting:
"Pablo Neruda! Present! Now and Forever!"
Pablo, our own Don Pablo, always present, with us, now, and forever!!!
I mean Pablo the African who was born in Parral/Chile and took up a Czech pen-name that stuck.
But I shall lack voice and verbal skill. The words of Pablo must not be approached lightly.
Or carelessly.
They must not be play-hoisted on whimsical rant-spots without consultations with the multiple radiances of the multiple celestial forces whom he opened up to.
The gods of songs that filled and flowed through him with all that painful/joyful eloquence.
Maybe I should let the man do his own talking, while we sit back and watch/read:
How many of us, petty mortals, have not lived our lives in perpetual quests for that time/age of which it was said:
...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadows perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.
Those are his words. But they are believable in the same way as a prophet drunk on his god's power can be believable. Must be believable.
Here was a man drunk with the great starry void who became the very image of the mystery.
Touched by the pure fire of the divine muses, he could also become a pure part of the abyss.
He was so free he could wheel with the stars. Wheel with the stars, just like that...
Here was a man drunk with the great starry void who became the very image of the mystery.
Touched by the pure fire of the divine muses, he could also become a pure part of the abyss.
He was so free he could wheel with the stars. Wheel with the stars, just like that...
And that freedom-seed, having found a home in his bosom, would turn him into a chanticleer for redemption songs every where the shadows of fetters dared to show up.
In Spain of the fascist storm-tides, against the norm of hypocritical yea-saying, he would set up his untameable/barbaric yawp against what many of us pretend not to see today on the streets of Tripoli/Damascus/Tikrit/Baghdad/Kabul/Istanbul/Mexico City/Medellin/Bogota/La Paz/Mogadishu...He would shake his rattle of uncomfortable words-as-weapons against the hypocritical lie that sought/seeks to veil:
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!
But Neruda could hate so much because he could also love so well. Love so well and paint love so well. In his hands, all the rough diamonds came out sparkling and all the abandoned bundles let out their treasures:
I have named you queen.
There are taller ones than you, taller.
There are purer ones than you, purer.
There are lovelier ones than you, lovelier.
But you are the queen....
And when you appear
all the rivers sound in my body, bells
shake the sky,
and a hymn fills the world.
Only you and I,
only you and I, my love,
listen to it.
He could be desperate too; sending pleading moans into the vertiginous doubtfields...carefully sculpted gems akin to those we maimed on the cusp of our first orgasmic spurts when we neither knew the old/real names for the experience, nor dared to speak too loud lest we make the magic glow go:
Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.
Do not take away the rose,
the lanceflower that you pluck,
the water that suddenly
bursts forth in your joy,
the sudden wave of silver born in you...
And he could be the freaky romantic we dare not speak for at day and yet wet-dream of at night: The wild untamed beast-as-it-should-be-in-love, free from all the fetid/fickle/feckless/foolish moralities that drive us into stale prison-cells of the conventional missionary position and other such boring-dos. The ultimate poet-laureate of Naked-Town and Succulent Breasts and Erect Nipples and Wet Armpits and Heaving Arses and Shining Foreheads and Glistening Teeth and Seductive Eyes. Of the bloody/fiery mutual fuck; the taboo that we must all endure/enjoy at least once...and then again and again and again:
I am the tiger.
I lie in wait for you among leaves
broad as ingots of wet mineral.
The white river grows
beneath the fog. You come.
Naked you submerge.
I wait.
Then in a leap
of fire, blood, teeth,
with a claw slash I tear away
your bosom, your hips.
I drink your blood, I break
your limbs one by one...
Talk again of the untranslatable barbaric yawp. The ultimate prophet of the cannibalistic orgy who compels our admiration. But also a supremely secure man at the height of his powers who knows just how on top of things one could be if one touches the right sacred spots and tickles the right nerves:
Facing you
I am not jealous.
Come with a man
at your back,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your bosom and your feet
come like a river
filled with drowned men
that meets the furious sea,
the eternal foam, the weather.
Bring them all
where I wait for you:
we shall always be alone,
we shall always be, you and I,
alone upon the earth
to begin life
Alone. Alone with the Stars. Alone with the Celestial Fires that forced their blazes through his pores and made him the timeless/restless chanteur of joys/hopes/fears/desires we still have with us aplenty.
And as he loved so much, let his beloved Matilde Urrutia have the final say on the final journey he made in order to join the stars/oceans/constellations/divinities he sang so well:
As we pass the streets, people pour out from them and join the procession. Military vehicles appear carrying soldiers who have their machine guns pointed at us. But they hold back; they only want to scare us. It doesn't work. At every turn, more and more people join the procession and they raise their voice together, shouting:
"Pablo Neruda! Present! Now and Forever!"
Thursday, 16 June 2011
Why I Don't Go to Church
Into the refuge of my office space, today, flowed a specimen of the despicable debris of the religious charlatan who, true to type, strides in with the confidence of a know-it-all intent on saving threatened souls from looming damnation and the terrors of hell. And he luridly captures it in terms that constitute a vastly inferior imitation of Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God".
Would he even know that others like him, before him, have also tried to use the cheap tactic of psychological terror to woo the weak and take their possessions/collection as a reward? Perhaps no. Perhaps that doesn't even matter.
Mayhap by the special dispensation of his merciful divine Justifier(?), the jambs of eternity have held, one more month, to allow me and people like me to change our minds and subscribe to the wonderful insurance plan that ultimate pays with romps on the gold-plated streets of the Heaven he and only he sees. Or punish with the bonfire of the vanities recast in eternal frames by pitch-fork wielding demons who so gleefully help out the eternal Holy Terror of God-his God.
Some metaphors hatched in infantile fantasies...
Some laughters grown too thick to sustain
Against the insistent ardour of jokes out-covering their terms of reference...
And some of us have thought all this while that in all matters unseen and spiritual, each one might be allowed to follow their own daemon/ genius/guardian angel, etc etc.
Well. To all my good-intentioned neighbours of the now and the future who would try to save my soul and bring me "back home to the church where I belong," this is my simple answer to you:
I don't go to church because I love my God so much and I love to be where he is.And my God-my God, he does not live in a church. 'Does not live in cheap, imported, mass-brand fantasies that spur purblind fools into prisons of mind/body/soul/spirit.
Why would he?
How possibly could he?
When would all the pseudo-salvationists come to understand that it takes an extremely narrow-minded conception of the divine to limit him to some obstreperous contraption of cantankerous two-penny con-artists? And that some, at least, can see how obvious that is?
My God is big. Big enough to hold court in the entire universe without the constraints of narrow national orthodoxies and blabbers of racist bombast. And like Him/Her, I like to give wings to my spiritual strivings; I allow them to soar and explore in all the places where my awesome destiny compels me.
My God and I, we are doing so well without the constraints of the cheap materialist faggots. And we mean to continue our Romance that way. And I am glad Tsali/Jesus/Mohammed/Anokye/Buddha and all them other cool guys agree with me.
Would he even know that others like him, before him, have also tried to use the cheap tactic of psychological terror to woo the weak and take their possessions/collection as a reward? Perhaps no. Perhaps that doesn't even matter.
Mayhap by the special dispensation of his merciful divine Justifier(?), the jambs of eternity have held, one more month, to allow me and people like me to change our minds and subscribe to the wonderful insurance plan that ultimate pays with romps on the gold-plated streets of the Heaven he and only he sees. Or punish with the bonfire of the vanities recast in eternal frames by pitch-fork wielding demons who so gleefully help out the eternal Holy Terror of God-his God.
Some metaphors hatched in infantile fantasies...
Some laughters grown too thick to sustain
Against the insistent ardour of jokes out-covering their terms of reference...
And some of us have thought all this while that in all matters unseen and spiritual, each one might be allowed to follow their own daemon/ genius/guardian angel, etc etc.
Well. To all my good-intentioned neighbours of the now and the future who would try to save my soul and bring me "back home to the church where I belong," this is my simple answer to you:
I don't go to church because I love my God so much and I love to be where he is.And my God-my God, he does not live in a church. 'Does not live in cheap, imported, mass-brand fantasies that spur purblind fools into prisons of mind/body/soul/spirit.
Why would he?
How possibly could he?
When would all the pseudo-salvationists come to understand that it takes an extremely narrow-minded conception of the divine to limit him to some obstreperous contraption of cantankerous two-penny con-artists? And that some, at least, can see how obvious that is?
My God is big. Big enough to hold court in the entire universe without the constraints of narrow national orthodoxies and blabbers of racist bombast. And like Him/Her, I like to give wings to my spiritual strivings; I allow them to soar and explore in all the places where my awesome destiny compels me.
My God and I, we are doing so well without the constraints of the cheap materialist faggots. And we mean to continue our Romance that way. And I am glad Tsali/Jesus/Mohammed/Anokye/Buddha and all them other cool guys agree with me.
Wednesday, 15 June 2011
Exactly WHAT is NATO doing in Libya?
And who asked them in? And for whose interests are they killing the thousands they will kill tonight?
Sometimes one can't help but ask, amidst all the hypocritical sound-bites that the international corporate media seeks to crowd minds and eyes with.
Exactly who asked for tens of thousands of ordinary African citizens to be murdered by European and American arms/mercenaries under the guise of freeing the "benighted natives from their savage kinsmen"?
Could it possibly be that some people are still worried about how it came to be their their oil is still in their soil? And how it is that the oil of Texas came to nestle uneasily under the presumptuous soil of Tripoli/Benghazi/Sirte?
Could be it that some newly minted statesmen who need high-heel shoes to boost what little self-esteems they have think that murdering defenceless civilians would finally make up for what they lack in stature?
Could it be that some mongrel folks with "questionable allegiances" need to prove just how faithful they are to the cause of Empire by wreaking bloodbaths in spaces where the political cost is likely to be zero and the gains for their Texas/Wall Street masters tantalizingly good?
What is America doing, once again killing African citizens indiscriminately after the sordid history of the past five hundred years?
And what is Europe, its day in the sun at last done and its fantasies of former glory no more than dying embers of a fire stuttering into well-earned oblivion... what is Europe doing sponsoring mayhem on my continent?
And do they presume that we shall always say--in a lame nod to the gods of lame stupidity--that "God forgive White Europe"?
These are initial questions. But we shall seek more...and more...if we need to.
Euro-America, we are counting your sins.
We may not forgive when you shall finally find the courage to live up to basic human obligations.
Sometimes one can't help but ask, amidst all the hypocritical sound-bites that the international corporate media seeks to crowd minds and eyes with.
Exactly who asked for tens of thousands of ordinary African citizens to be murdered by European and American arms/mercenaries under the guise of freeing the "benighted natives from their savage kinsmen"?
Could it possibly be that some people are still worried about how it came to be their their oil is still in their soil? And how it is that the oil of Texas came to nestle uneasily under the presumptuous soil of Tripoli/Benghazi/Sirte?
Could be it that some newly minted statesmen who need high-heel shoes to boost what little self-esteems they have think that murdering defenceless civilians would finally make up for what they lack in stature?
Could it be that some mongrel folks with "questionable allegiances" need to prove just how faithful they are to the cause of Empire by wreaking bloodbaths in spaces where the political cost is likely to be zero and the gains for their Texas/Wall Street masters tantalizingly good?
What is America doing, once again killing African citizens indiscriminately after the sordid history of the past five hundred years?
And what is Europe, its day in the sun at last done and its fantasies of former glory no more than dying embers of a fire stuttering into well-earned oblivion... what is Europe doing sponsoring mayhem on my continent?
And do they presume that we shall always say--in a lame nod to the gods of lame stupidity--that "God forgive White Europe"?
These are initial questions. But we shall seek more...and more...if we need to.
Euro-America, we are counting your sins.
We may not forgive when you shall finally find the courage to live up to basic human obligations.
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
I Can't Go On, I Will Go On
Between the radical swagger of Amiri Baraka and the existentialist gyrations of Albert Camus, one finds, if one looks deep enough, useful parsings of the imponderable mystery of death...especially death by suicide.
And why should death by suicide be an interesting subject?
Simple: On the evidence of all the glories of life as is, suicide presents itself as the most heroic choice of our age.
To hear Camus tell it, it is that which you take up, gloriously, on the bright morning when you ran out of reasons for going on; the act that heralds the day when "you can't go on".
Baraka's complication puts it slightly differently: Suicide is great and worthwhile, and all the smart ones of our generation must consider it, at some point. Of course, with the catch: One must write a twenty-volume suicide note first. You know, something to explain to those who must of necessity poke rigor mortis for its secrets. A twenty-volume note, and then a preface too.
Moral? It is not really about dying. We have died before. We die everyday. We may be already dead, even.
It is the consciousness of the reality of death, and our consciousness as active participants in the process that makes makes discourses about death and suicide potentially redemptive. Even revolutionary.
To Beckett's words, and my title, now:
The palpable atmosphere of despair that rules so large has the habit of making most of us give in too soon, convinced that we can do nothing, must do nothing.
But the human will can and must transcend. We can transform the death cry that threatens to atrophy the will if we , like Amiri, can see that even the inevitability of suicide is nothing nothing but a golden opportunity to write one, ten, twenty, even a hundred volumes of what we want life to be.
In the darkest night, life needs affirmers to re-assert itself. And we can choose to be those affirmative action-eers.
Or simply go silently into the dark night without so much as a whimper.
Like Soyinka's man of the dark jails who died. In silence. Because he kept quiet. In the face of tyranny.
We can go on.
We must go on.
We will go on.
And why should death by suicide be an interesting subject?
Simple: On the evidence of all the glories of life as is, suicide presents itself as the most heroic choice of our age.
To hear Camus tell it, it is that which you take up, gloriously, on the bright morning when you ran out of reasons for going on; the act that heralds the day when "you can't go on".
Baraka's complication puts it slightly differently: Suicide is great and worthwhile, and all the smart ones of our generation must consider it, at some point. Of course, with the catch: One must write a twenty-volume suicide note first. You know, something to explain to those who must of necessity poke rigor mortis for its secrets. A twenty-volume note, and then a preface too.
Moral? It is not really about dying. We have died before. We die everyday. We may be already dead, even.
It is the consciousness of the reality of death, and our consciousness as active participants in the process that makes makes discourses about death and suicide potentially redemptive. Even revolutionary.
To Beckett's words, and my title, now:
The palpable atmosphere of despair that rules so large has the habit of making most of us give in too soon, convinced that we can do nothing, must do nothing.
But the human will can and must transcend. We can transform the death cry that threatens to atrophy the will if we , like Amiri, can see that even the inevitability of suicide is nothing nothing but a golden opportunity to write one, ten, twenty, even a hundred volumes of what we want life to be.
In the darkest night, life needs affirmers to re-assert itself. And we can choose to be those affirmative action-eers.
Or simply go silently into the dark night without so much as a whimper.
Like Soyinka's man of the dark jails who died. In silence. Because he kept quiet. In the face of tyranny.
We can go on.
We must go on.
We will go on.
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