On a novel by Caryl Phillips

On a Novel by Caryl Phillips

Phillips, Caryl. Cambridge. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd., 1991; London: Vintage, 2008.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved deftly exposes the psychology of enslavement in North America, but it is Dessa Rose by Sherley Anne Williams that succeeds best in exposing the narratological features of a female slave’s “story,” namely the verbal strategies she uses to retard the extent to which her story (herstory vs. history) can be stolen.  Caryl Phillips, however, ought to be valued as much as Williams and Morrison from the angle of post-colonial witnessing.  In his novel Cambridge, he “films” the tragic irony of the metanarrative of the enslaver and the enslaved, bringing to fiction what Hegel brought to philosophy.

Morrison, Williams, and Phillips inscribe the space of slavery in the so-called New World.  That space, or actually what is a remembered space-time continuum, also includes time-management in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.  Walker and Jones sharpen views of how novels on slavery overflow generic boundaries and conventions; their novels are glosses on the phenomenology of slavery in human histories.  The spectacle of shared responsibility regarding the multi-layered “Other” in the production of identity riddles, paradoxes, and dilemmas. We gaze on the “Other” as an ancient entity that has newly migrated from Chaos to Reality. And our gaze establishes proof that we are looking at nothing.

Phillips’s special contribution to the mimesis of the absurdly absent is his excellence in dealing with dialogic imagination.  He enables language to penetrate slavery’s dark shadows.

Phillips is meticulous in recovering 19^th century British English in several registers throughout the linked parts of Cambridge: 1) Emily Cartwright’s journal of her visit to her father’s West Indian plantation is a travelogue that doubles as both a treatise  on animal nature and as a “blind” confessional memoir regarding abolitionist yearnings; 2) the slave Cambridge’s autobiographical justification of revenge, so resonant of Equiano’s narrative and Nat Turner’s disputed confession; 3) the feature story by an unnamed journalist which details Cambridge’s murder of “a person by the name of Brown.” Brown, the overseer of the estate which belonged to Emily’s father is, one must guess, the father of the bastard to which the very proper Emily gives birth.  Thus, the newspaper story is a public deposition for the enlightenment of colonial slave-owners.  The narrator’s Prologue and Epilogue frame the white female and black and white male gendering of story.  Phillips uses his excellent mimetic skills to reveal the twisted psychology and ethics of the always already fallen world made by the enslaved and the enslavers.  Cambridge is one of the finest examples of the purpose post-colonial fictions serve.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            December 15, 2014

Literary Crime and Punishment

I believe you do remember a scene from the 1971 film of Anthony Burgess's dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, the scene where the young criminal Alex is strapped in a chair and forced to watch hours and hours of violent, graphic films. What a lovely bit of British black humor, of an objective correlative of the Old Testament, of violent salvation.  Let us dream a political scene of American white humor: all of our senators and representatives are forced to endure aversion therapy. Strapped in hard Puritan chairs, they wear headgear that does not allow their eyes to blink.  They are forced to watch Pier Paola Pasolini's film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom.  They are forced to watch the film twice before they are released. The film is a pornographic monstrosity, a very Italian bit of red humor.  The film is, as Francesco W. M. Palmieri noted inLiberazione, October 2005, "the erotic spasm of a diabolical angel."

I remember that when I discussed Pasolini and Salo very briefly with James Baldwin many years ago that we agreed that Pasolini had crossed a moral line of no return, a soul-murdering line.  In the Age of Cosmic Evil, it would be a fine gesture of post-human justice to compel our politicians to watch themselves and regurgitate "the pleasure of corruption."  They might emerge from the experience as paragons of patriotic justice.  As our nation goosesteps into Armageddon, we should dream. 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr. 

December 13, 2014

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.