The C.I.A. Report

Affairs of the State

Bullets lust for flesh

As testy water

Seeks a level to

Torture barley

Into tea.  And things just be

Whenever

Courtly

Intelligence

Ages

Into tea.  And things just be

 Plagiarizing peanuts

Changing

Into

Air

So fine, so free, so fair

As iconic pain

Bleeds blue to bleed,

The ink of treason’s trust.

Bullets’ lust for flesh,

Torment time

Into  tea. And things just be.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.    December 10, 2014

The Raped Women

Tonight I listened to six women who alleged on CNN that  they had been raped by Bill Cosby.

As I listened to them, I heard the voices of six women who gave birth to proof that they had been raped on slave ships and plantations by Bill ABCXYZ.

What is to be learned from such uncanny experience?


J. W. Ward, Jr.
Decemember 8, 2014 

December 7, 1941-2014

Ferguson/Fear/Fury

“If any are anxious to ascertain who I am, know the world, that I am one of the oppressed, degraded and wretched sons of Africa, rendered so by the avaricious and unmerciful, among the whites.”

David Walker, Appeal, Article IV (1829)

40.  Verily the Day of Sorting Out is the time appointed for all of them.

41.  The Day when no protector can avail his client in anything, and no help can they receive,

42.  Except such as receive Allah’s Mercy: for He is Exalted in Might, Most Merciful.

43.  Verily the tree of Zaqqum

44.  Will be the food of the sinful,--

Qur’an, Surah 44

From the notebook of a visitor to Earth

August 16, 2014

Dreams of harmony and peace or absurd visions of the end of time are legitimate constructions of human imagination. If you are dealing with pure cinema, they are effective.  Such spectacles appear to confirm the implacable universality of violence, the murky origins of terrorism, and the marriage of reason with insanity. They are primary features of life on planet Earth. Women and men may satisfy their fantasies by speaking of amoral Nature in their own images. They are free to tamper with Nature in efforts to make a more living-friendly “world.”  They may succeed for brief periods of time. 

Ultimately, they fail. They manufacture abstract and material “worlds” that are mercurial, that speak back to them of their cosmic insignificance in visual and audible languages which negate interpretations.

Ultimately, they forfeit Cosmic Good.  They replace a greater god with a lesser one.  Ultimately, they worship Cosmic Evil. Planet Earth assumes a death-bound color.

All that happened in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 is a bitter rerun of tribally-motivated antiquities. A frantic male of one tribe, believing himself to be authorized by the Holy Bible, the United States Constitution, a badge of office, and the laws of Charles Darwin, murders a male of a different tribe. People who identify themselves with the dead male react naturally.  They are shocked.  They grieve. They make counter-violence.   Unfortunately, the grief of injustice is paradoxically understood and misunderstood in a nanosecond by the American body politic.

December 7, 2014

Today is the 73^rd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Violence obeys folklore and Holy Bible injunctions to increase and multiply.  American as well as foreign mass media take delight in spewing misinformation (or disinformation) about how violence procreates.  Mass media refuses to analyze the systemic nature of violence. Infotainment becomes impotent when it beholds what is actually systemic.

In the historical drama entitled “The United States of America, “the George Zimmermans, Darren Wilsons, Peter Liangs, and Daniel Pantaleos are proclaimed to be the stars of the show. They are the militants who keep democracy safe for those who are wealthy enough to buy it. It is most often the case that oddly instructed grand juries applaud them. The Michael Browns, Akai Gurleys, Eric Garners, Trayvon Martins and the thousands of unarmed dead who were the targets are treated as footnotes in the smallest print on the playbill. Do you dare to ask why many (but not all) African Americans are profoundly angry?  Do you dare to ask whether some (but not all) American police officers are clones of Rosemary’s Baby?

 In the sacred narratives of womankind and mankind, violence is proclaimed to be natural and universal.

 According to such logic ---

the American Nightmare that has replaced the American Dream;

the death-bound mission of Europe and international cartels;

the family squabbles between Palestinians and Israelis and diabolic plots in the Arab/Islamic winter of the Middle East;

the symbolic assassination of the President of the United States;

the neo-barbarism of ISIS and other agents of imperial terrorism;

the progress of environmental destruction in Asia and the Americas;

the rampant neo-colonialism and unique ethnic hatreds on the continent of Africa;

 a periodic outbreak of such health treats as Ebola, HIV-AIDS, and yearly variations of influenza;

the refusal to acknowledge the humanity of indigenous peoples everywhere;

 the wages of global climate change;

the open season that males of no-color have declared on males of color

-----according to such logic, all these things are normal on Earth. After all, this is the season of Advent and Christmas shall arrive despite the blessings of Cosmic Evil.

The growing number of murders of African American males should anger many Americans to the point of being totally irrational.  They should petition the United Nations to investigate whether the United States of America should be brought to the World Court for crimes against humanity, for the injustice of benign genocide. Unfortunately, the iron-clad logic of the absurd may stall such a request.  Many Americans confuse transparent criticism with treason. They want to believe that a meek savior will serve peace and harmony at a post-post-racial banquet.  They forget that the dessert at the feast will be the fruit of the tree of Zaqqum. The Day of Sorting Out has arrived.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

The Web of 2014 Circumstances

2014 Circumstances

Given the webs of circumstance this December, it is just to quote the final paragraph of Charles Chesnutt’s “The Web of Circumstance.”

Some time, we are told, when the cycle of years has rolled around, there is to be another golden age, when all men will dwell together in love and harmony, and when peace and righteousness shall prevail for a thousand years.  God speed the day, and let not the shining thread of hope become so enmeshed in the web of circumstance that we lose sight of it; but give us here and there, and now and then, some little foretaste of this golden age, that we may the more patiently and hopefully await its coming!

Given the web of 2014 circumstances, the final paragraph of Charles Chesnutt’s “The Web of Circumstance” has just been quoted.

Poetry Research

AARN Message

November 30, 2014

A Note on Howard Rambsy’s Poetry Research

Research on African American literature and the study of African American culture(s) are contiguous.  Nevertheless, rigorous scholarship requires that we separate cultural research questions from those we ask in our formal analyses and interpretation of works of literature.  It is appropriate to integrate cultural and literary findings in our articles and books, but we ought to be conscious of subtle differences in asking What are the topics or themes a poet addresses in creating a poem? and asking What are the uses or purposes of a completed poem?  We should be discriminating in dealing with form, content, and contexts. 

Such discrimination is illustrated by Howard Rambsy’s documentation of a recent activity involving African American poetry and “social networking.” His work is a model of conducting African American cultural research. Following many ideas proposed in Antony Easthope’s Literary Into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1991), Rambsy begins to explore this research question:

How have some African American poets “spoken out” regarding a tragic event in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014 and the spectacular aftermath of that event?

In his email of November 30, 2014, Rambsy wrote

A couple of days ago, a group of poets organized a show of solidarity with these recent movements against police brutality. The poets decided to present poems on YouTube and Facebook and open with a common statement "I am a black poet who will not remain silent while this nation murders black people. I have a right to be angry." They used the hashtag #BlackPoetsSpeakOut.

Applying some basic bibliographic approaches to the project, I decided to do a roundup of all the contributions. You can check it out here. You're probably familiar with a few of the poets, including Treasure Redmond, Jericho Brown, and Reginald Harris. But many more might be unfamiliar to you. Most of the 100 poets I've listed are somewhat "new" in their careers. 
 
Here's the list:  A roundup of #BlackPoetsSpeakOut Selections  

I offered some commentary here:  A few notes on #BlackPoetsSpeakOut  

It's good to see groups of poets organizing like this. 

Rambsy is exploring a meaningful contemporary phenomenon in the social and political uses of black poetry. The embedded links give us access to his academic website “Cultural Front: A Notebook on literary art, digital humanities, and emerging ideas” and to the actual material he is collecting and examining. He is using digital means to record information about a digital phenomenon.  His methods are cutting-edge. They might influence methodological choices and thinking about future research projects.  For example, during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, much politically engaged poetry was disseminated by way of phonograph records and tape recordings [see the Discography and Tape Index, pages 448-454, in Eugene B. Redmond’s Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976)]. Now, engaged poetry is transmitted by video recordings in a social network.  To what extent is the current phenomenon indebted to the Black Arts Movement?  How are the cognitive and aesthetic effects of what is occurring now different from those that obtained fifty years ago?

It is obvious that Rambsy’s work is more germane to cultural and literacy studies than to traditional literary studies (if one uses a strict definition of “literary”), because the research results in the creation of data to mark the occurrence of a trend which may or may not become a lasting feature of African American cultural practices.  Implicit questions multiply and give us new directions to explore.

Rambsy’s research at the moment is a logical development of the work that informed his book The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011) as well as the critical attention to poetry and  Afrofuturism  in the special issue of Journal of Ethnic American Literature, Issue 4 (2014), which he guest-edited.

His research on poets “speaking out “ about the tragedy of  Ferguson  and his website are valuable resources for inquiry about  the impact technology (digital humanities) can have on literary production, on  recycling and new uses of poetry texts from the near past , on symbolic rhetoric  in the United States, and on reader/viewer reception and response.   African American Research members can profit from how Rambsy has used his website to produce new ideas and models for research in African American literature and culture.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

The Redemption of Cornel West

THE REDEMPTION OF CORNEL WEST

At the end of Black Prophetic Fire (Boston: Beacon, 2014), Cornel West plants a troubling seed. “The Black prophetic tradition,” he suggests, “has tried to redeem the soul of our fragile democratic experiment.  Is it redeemable” (165)?  Should you  be persuaded by the visceral wit of Charles Simic’s November 26 New York Review of Books blog “ A Thieves’(sic) Thanksgiving,” you hasten to say “No.” With tongue in cheek, Simic, a Serbian American and our fifteenth Poet Laureate, intimates that Wall Street crooks are admired by their peers, by politicians and presidents on the take, and by students in elite universities. 

These thieves are admired because they have transcended the rule of law.  Simic believes such mega-criminality might lead America to ruin or into becoming “a genuine police state…as the end result of that insatiable greed for profit that has already affected every aspect of American life.”  Simic misses the target, or maybe he never aimed for it.  It is not greed for profit but greed for power and hegemony that is enshrined in the founding documents of the United States that is killing America. The criminality is systemic.  When that recognition is juxtaposed with the question posed by Cornel West, it is clear that America has never had a soul to be redeemed. Puritan lies notwithstanding, God did not create the nation .  People who dared to think they were created in God’s image created the nation. A prophetic tradition will not redeem America, but the tradition can redeem Cornel West and a few other people.

Having had a fling with fame, West seems prepared in Black Prophetic Fire to journey home like a sensible prodigal son and to receive the blessings of his intellectual fathers ----David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. DuBois.  West seems to have renounced the antics of a populist and returned to speaking like the radical bourgeois thinker  he has been since the publication of The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989), which may be his most brilliant work.  Black Prophetic Fire is a provocative dialogue with Christa Buschendorf, who also edited the exchange. 

Unlike a traditional Socratic dialogue, this one is artfully innovative in its use of shared authority.  Buschendorf’s portions of conversation are as bracing as West’s masterful remarks.  The conversation is orchestrated to display West’s radical intelligence at its very best as he expounds with specificity about the minds and deeds of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Ida B. Wells.  The flaw that merits trenchant critique, however, is his embracing the mythology that such an entity as Black America exists.  You, echoing the words of Cross Damon in The Outsider, must remind him that like the wind the myth men have gone; the real men, the last men envisioned by Margaret Walker in “For My People” have arrived.

 West, of course, has the last words about the prophetic tradition in the Age of Obama.  Despite his dwelling a bit too long in the garden of defunct Black American myth, he succeeds in redeeming himself. What he proclaims bravely will not sit well with the majority of his fellow Americans.  He shall be castigated, if not crucified, for breathing a truth. West preaches like a Baptist minister who is without sin to an Anglican congregation.  If you think of his language as poetry, you find he speaks more like Melvin B. Tolson than like Langston Hughes.  Indeed, you could devise a series of seminars by jotting down the names of theorists and artists who have shaped West’s intellect and then reading what these figures have written.  It would be especially important to read Anton Chekhov, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, DuBois, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Prophecy, as West clearly reminds us, is not about foretelling a future.  Its job is detecting the effective motions of cosmic evil and how those motions operate to destroy the moral elements of humanity. As has long been the case with Black prophetic tradition, what burns in Black Prophetic Fire “has a universal message for all human beings concerned about justice and freedom” (164).

West has the integrity to avoid selling impossible dreams.  He is fairly honest about how his beliefs and prejudices are grounded in religion and multiple ideologies.  In the context of the tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 and the more dreadful tragedies that will be birthed in 2015 and thereafter, West’s prophecies regarding the Age of Obama are as chilling as Alpha Phi Alpha ice.  It would spoil your reading of the book to say more than that West has weighed the feathers and found the Obama presidency to be wanting.  And all of us in varying degrees can be redeemed by a very critical but very compassionate reading of Black Prophetic Fire.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

November 29, 2014

Some Ends of an Endless Quest

Some Ends of an Endless Quest

Richard Wright (1908-1960), whom I have long championed as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century, is to be valued more for the surgical qualities of his mind than for the lapidary qualities of his imagination.  My argument pivots on a belief that Wright asked better questions of the world he knew for fifty-two years than did many of his contemporaries and that the questions were better in the sense that they possessed, to use Wright’s phrasing from “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” a complex simplicity. The paradoxical wording alerts us to mankind’s endless quest to make sense of the absurdity which assumes palpable forms in our experiences of living. Wright was not always right in his analyses of literature, cultures, and political history.  Nevertheless, he was defiant, relentless in his critical judgments regarding systems of explanation and determined to be an independent thinker to the extent that use of language permits relative independence.  His quest was an epic quarrel with the limits of his world.  Examined closely, his unfinished questioning, quest to secure meaning or a facsimile of meaning, and quarrels with dystopian time and space serve as a model for how a few of us who work as scholars and teachers might justify what we do with language.  He is a mentor for those who give more than casual attention to their lives and the lives of others. Recognition of his intellectual value for his time and the present is a determining factor in my research projects, the choices I have made in writing against the academic grain, and the risks I have taken during more than four decades of teaching.

Unlike some of his better-known modernist contemporaries ---William Faulkner, Zora Neal Hurston, Eudora Welty, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright overtly rejected some aspects of Western aesthetics while he covertly used other aspects to accomplish his didactic purposes.  It might be argued that some of his contemporaries used artful strategies to accommodate the dominant trends of modernism as they explored the imaginary geographies of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. That aesthetic trinity did not satisfy Wright’s penchant for exploring traces of nationalism in African American expressive cultures and locating himself in the dread-marked territories of pre-and post World War II global realignments. If the aesthetic trinity was yin, Wright invested his creative energies in the yang constituted by the Evil, the False, and the Ugly. By fashioning himself as one representative voice for all the peoples of the world who were the objects of injustice and inevitable wretchedness, Wright established a strong claim on living and writing as a world citizen who interrogated both the process and the narratives of human history and influenced thinking among diverse audiences. How Wright taught non-academic audiences to think with fierce independence is not alien in discourses focused on scholarship and transmitting knowledge. The Academy has no monopoly on the questions he encouraged people to ponder.   There may be some gradual recognition of that fact in the ongoing shifting of literary studies to cultural studies, a shifting that is sped up and altered by the emergence of new technologies as tools for investigating, discovering, and packaging information as knowledge. As we move toward possible futures, it is obvious that the good and the evil, the true and the false, and the beautiful and the ugly as aesthetic abstractions are not mutually exclusive but complementary. Wright’s works continue to be excellent guides for questing and questioning.

I.                    Region and Race

II.                Urban spaces –from lecture two

III.             International Concerns

The ends or purposes of my continuing quest to understand Wright’s life, the surgical qualities of his mind, and his works do to a great extent define and give meaning to my efforts to be a productive citizen of the world and of the United States of America. I send forth words. If people, especially students, listen to them and empower themselves through their own forms of resistance, that is good. Whatever the outcomes ultimately are, no one can honestly say that I did not try to be clear and open about my motives. The genuine pleasure I find in my work is asking questions of a world that replies with its own open-ended answers.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

October 30, 2014