The Joy of Refusing
From a pre-future vantage, one can discover the joy of
refusing. Refusing or resisting is
neither an innate virtue nor a vice, despite the fact that one must ultimately
account for the moral properties of
one's actions . Refusing is an
opportunity to live with the alternatives that might better identify one's
historicity. Consider the outcomes of
refusing to read such commercially promoted books as
Gyasi, Yaa. Homegoing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.
Unigwe, Chika. On
Black Sisters Street. New York:
Random House, 2009.
Parker, Nate, ed. The
Birth of a Nation: Nat Turner and the Making of a Movement. New York: Atria,
2016.
One profits from viewing displacement at some
distance. For example, Gyasi was born in
Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, a place that is not free to forget its
association with segregation and slavery; Unigwe was born in Nigeria and now
lives in Belgium, a place condemned to remember the obscene crimes it committed
in Africa; Parker, who was born in Norfolk,Virginia, complies an official movie
tie-in for his cinematic effort to manufacture ironies by partial deconstruction
of D. W. Griffin's 1915 film The Birth of
a Nation, an iconic visual monument to American racism, and of William Styron's
The Confessions of Nat Turner, a
literary tribute to the making of "whiteness." Refusing to engage the two novels and the
film allows one to "buy" time for evaluation at some distance from the
dubious race to be au courant. Chosen
ignorance is not bliss but a Trump-like signal of independence. It marks one's being partially immune to the
gestures of the herd or the culture-consuming mob.
There is fine sport in sampling the first and the closing
sentences of the novels ------
Gyasi: "The night Effia Otcher was born into the
musky heat of Fanteland, a fire raged through the woods just outside her father's
compound (3)….Marjorie splashed him suddenly, laughing loudly before swimming
away, toward the shore" (300). [the
conditions of historical accidents]
Unigwe: "The
world was exactly as it should be (3)….Sisi's soul bounced down the stairs and
began its journey into another world"(254). [the condition of sex workers]
Parker's book
invites sampling longer passages.
"How many of you know who Nat Turner is?" I wasn't the only one staring blankly at my
African-American Studies professor. I'd
overheard the name once or twice in my childhood, but without context --the
where, the why, and the what of his story ---his name had no resonance. (3)
The story of Nat Turner, and stories of the struggles and
triumphs of other enslaved African people, are only one small portion of the
total Pan-African experience. But as
they relate to the current state of affairs ---these stories are powerfully
salient tools in community healing and restoration. Nat Turner knew that Black lives mattered in
the 1800s. The story of his dedication
and sacrifice for his people can empower us to make that a reality today. (176)
[the conditions of memory]
If the three works have validity in one's determining the
contested nature of "Truth," there are advantages in the joy of refusing
to read them before 2026 when enslavement has a new face.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. November 2, 2016
