requiem for human dreams

Requiem for Human Dreams

"Today there can be no doubt that Americans know the facts; and yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved."  This sentence from W. E. B. DuBois's article "A Negro Nation Within the Nation," Current History 42( 1935 ): 265-270 has been quoted by Ibram X. Kendi in Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016).  DuBois's assertion sounds in 2016 like a lament from a person in ideological pain, and there can be no doubt that Kendi quoted DuBois to remind us of the implacable and always changing conditions of human existence.  There are indigenous nations still within the United States of America, but we who have no membership in those nations  remain ignorant of them by choice.  Perhaps, the ignorance is more a reflex action than a rational choice, an unconscious motion of marking the authenticity of being an American.  Such ignorance and indifference, or selectivity in our commerce with facts, is not innately necessary or sufficient, a part of unadulterated biological functioning. It is a part of social and cultural engineering.   No doubt we remain unmoved by knowing this fact, because the excruciating pain of being an American paralyzes common sense as well as the qualities of charity, hope, and faith which manifest themselves in most of the religions of this world.

Stamped from the Beginning, like any book,  may only awaken a few dozen Americans and disturb the bliss of ignorance.  Nevertheless, Kendi's book may awaken a handful of Americans to recognize what such widely discussed books as Kevin Powell's The Education of Kevin Powell, Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow,  and Ta'Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me and such infrequently discussed books as Dennis de Rougemont's The Devil's Share, Sam Greenlee's Baghdad Blues,  Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd work toward by indirection: the abject cognitive  poverty of sentences in which the word "race" is the subject.  There can be no doubt that  Americans  remain indifferent and unmoved by arguments in Charles W. Mills's The Racial Contract, arguments that are as crucial as the fictions about terrorism which circulate internationally.

As an irreversible new ordering of the world descends upon us , cognitive poverty ascends.  In 2016, Americans and other human beings  know only two facts: (1) Nothing is neither true nor false, because it is nothing and (2) Everything is either true or false, because it is everything.  Know that these magic propositions ordain a requiem for human dreams.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            June 18, 2016

Poems by John A. Williams

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Poems by John A. Williams

It is common to identify a writer with a single genre --- W. E. B. DuBois with nonfiction, Toni Cade Bambara  with fiction, and August Wilson with drama, failing to remember that accomplished writers do not live in one penthouse or prison cell.  They, like non-writers,  explore, undertake  imaginary and real expeditions.  It is common to recognize that John A. Williams (1925-2015) wrote The Man Who Cried I Am, but quite out of the ordinary to know that he published Safari West: Poems (Montreal: Hochelaga Press, 1998), which won the American Book Award in the same year.  It is as uncommon to identify him as a poet as it is to identify Charles Johnson as a visual artist.

For readers in my generation, reading the forty-five poems in Safari West can be a rewarding exercise in discovery and renewal, in noting relocations of long-term dislocations.  One of the earliest poems "The Age of Bop" (1953) takes us back to the territory of attitude, innovation, and music associated with post-WWII events and the thematic  adventures of searching in Western worlds.  According to Williams,

Bustling Bop in retreat from Baroque

Finds it own answer, free from the yoke. (36)

Being "free from the yoke," however, is an ephemeral condition, because as Williams challenges the proposition in one stanza of  "Nat Turner's Profession" (1995)

All men whom others hold in bond

must one day know a time is near,

when they will meet their Babylon

in those with little left to fear. (19)

This irregular ballad stanza of thirty-two syllables gives voice to a promise that crashes into a Rococo delusion, a bourgeoisie entrapment that, in the language of Sterling D. Plumpp, is ornate with smoke. Reading Safari West is ultimately refreshing in its affirmation that as a poet, journalist, novelist, cultural critic, and witness of time, John A. Williams brought relentless common sense and clarity to the existential dimensions of being.  He really nailed wisdom in the brevity of "In Private" (1972) -----

Knowledgeable of myths

we create our own

seeking truth halfway. (47)

Safari West brings reality back to the promiscuous assignations we insist on having with poetry.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            June 13, 2016

political pornography

Political Pornography

A few decades ago in the Black South, it was not uncommon for black women who did domestic work to speak of "our white folks" as if they actually owned those people.  Such womanist talk involved subtle, racial codes.  It was easy to misinterpret what they were saying, to think they were speaking in terms of affection and intimacy about members of the family.  Their observations were based on proximity rather than endearment.  Love was not a part of the conversation.  When it is alleged that Donald Trump said "look at my African American,"  is it  reasonable to think he was talking like a domestic worker?  Hell, no.  His utterance was informed by the codes of the slave auction not those of the kitchen. "Donald, did you buy the dude at a discount?"

Unfortunately, we seem to lack reliable conservative voices to explain what Trump is saying about the opening of the American mind.  There is dead silence when it comes to discriminating between what Trump is selling and what Allan Bloom tried to market in The Closing of the American Mind (1987).  Yes, the neoliberal voices babble endlessly about Trump, but the attention they give him is informed by perverse blindness.  They seem not to see what Ralph Ellison inscribed about politics and the sociology of race in his beloved novel Invisible Man (1952), especially in the battle royal episode.  Those who are not visually challenged seem to have taken a vow of silence.  It is unfortunate that William Bennett, once one of the more important white conservative voices in America, loss his moral compass and can now say nothing that has credibility.

If you have read Invisible Man, you may recall that in the battle royal episode, "the most important men of the town" ---"bankers, lawyers, judges, doctors, fire chiefs, teachers, merchants…[e]ven one of the more fashionable pastors" were enthralled by "a magnificent blonde  --stark naked, "  a sex object who danced "a slow sensuous movement." The representative male citizens salivate, gazing upon her body "where below the small American flag tattooed upon her belly her thighs formed a capital V."  Trump is not a character in fiction, but he slobbers with alacrity in the presence of an immaculate, fictional symbol of the United States of America.

Our current political story is more gender-bent and intriguing than the one Ellison's narrator told.  As the great white Republican hope, Donald Trump is the narrative voice of the visible man poised to engaged in a bloodless battle royal with the visible woman, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic champion.  Perhaps as we move toward Election Day, American voters will confess that politics can be kinky, sublimely vulgar, and erotic.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            June 11, 2016