Ferguson, MO

Ferguson, Missouri

From the notebook of a visitor to Earth

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 imposing gender and 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,” and 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.

All that is happening in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 is merely a rerun of tribally-motivated antiquities. A frantic male of one tribe, believing himself to be authorized by the Holy Bible, the United States Constitution, and the codified 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 enact counter-violence, the only procedure that is paradoxically understood and misunderstood in a nanosecond by the American body politic. Violence is very obedient to folkloric injunctions to increase and multiply. And American as well as foreign mass media take special delight in the production of misinformation about how violence procreates. In the historical tragedy entitled the United States of America, the George Zimmermans and Darren Wilsons are proclaimed to be the stars of the show, the militants who keep democracy safe for those who are wealthy enough to buy it. The Michael Browns and Trayvon Martins and the thousands of unarmed dead who were the targets of tragedy are treated as footnotes in the smallest print on the playbill. In the sacred narratives of universal violence, this is proclaimed to be natural.  According to such logic, the American Nightmare that has decentered the American Dream; the death-bound mission of Europe; the family squabbles between Palestinians and Israelis and diabolic plots in the Arab/Islamic winter of the Middle East; the progress of environmental destruction in Asia; rampant neo-colonialism and unique ethnic hatreds on the continent of Africa; outbreaks of such health treats as Ebola and yearly variations of influenza; the refusal to acknowledge the humanity of indigenous peoples in Australia and the actuality of global climate change -----according to such logic, all is quite normal on Earth.

Unfortunately, this superb logic is not a part of the education of Americans.  The majority of them dwell in the darkness of believing that a meek savior will serve peace and harmony at the Finality Feast of Thanksgiving. Our transparent wisdom obligates us to tolerate their eternal ignorance but to act otherwise.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            August 16, 2014

Collecting

A Collection Remembered

Before Hurricane Katrina 2005 (we call it The Storm in New Orleans), I relished collecting manuscripts, books, and magazines.  The historian/poet Julius E. Thompson and I joked about our passion for books, congratulating ourselves that between us we had at least 80% of the African American poetry broadsides, chapbook, volumes and anthologies published since 1960. We were assiduous in buying the output of Broadside, Third World, and Lotus Presses; in having complete collections of Negro Digest/Black World, OBSIDIAN, Sagala, American Rag, First World, Callaloo, Hoo-Doo, Drumvoices Revue, Umbra, The Black Scholar; in treasuring our autographed books by Margaret Walker, Richard A. Long, Haki Madhubuti, Angela Jackson, Mari Evans, Sterling A. Brown, Sonia Sanchez, Kalamu ya Salaam, Tom Dent, Kiarri T-H. Cheatwood, Sterling D. Plumpp, Lance Jeffers, Harryette Mullen, Audre Lorde, Jay Wright, Michael Harper, Julia Fields, Carolyn Rodgers,  LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Pinkie Gordon Lane, Etheridge Knight, and such Mississippi writers as L. C. Dorsey, C. Liegh McInnis, Theodore Bozeman, Charlie Braxton, David Brian Williams, and  Otis Williams. I tried to buy all the poetry, fiction, and nonfiction Ishmael Reed and Alice Walker published as well as all the recordings of Cassandra Wilson, Isaac Hayes, and Esther Phillips. Julius bought hundreds of books on African American and Southern history. And the two of us were kids in the candy factory with regard to all the reprints of black materials during the 1970s.

Collecting was more than a simple matter of acquisition.  It had practical uses.  Having an extensive collection at hand made it easier to co-edit Black Southern Voices with John Oliver Killens and to compile Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry, to write literary criticism, and to share insights about black literature and culture with my students at Tougaloo College and Dillard University. Julius used his collection to write important books on Dudley Randall and Broadside Press, lynching in Mississippi, and black newspapers. There was also an irrational, special idiosyncrasy in my collecting. The physical objects allowed me to be in constant touch with the writers I got to know personally over the years; touching was a way of refreshing very pleasant memories.

The flooding after Katrina killed my passion for collecting. Losing relatives and friends is a thousand times more important than losing books and papers.  I still buy books, of course, but I no longer collect them. I leave collecting to colleges and universities and other institutions which are more able than I to prevent loss of items we want to transmit to a future. Moreover, the exorbitant cost of print books in the 21^st century far exceeds the modest book-buying budget my Social Security income permits

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

August 12, 2014           

Words for 8/11

Blood and Black Fires

 

And this is not a poem

 

I smell blood and black fire! Blood and black fire!

I see/hear an American mother crying. I see a father with a sign.

 

"You took my son away from me! You know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate? You know how many black men graduate? Not many!"

 

Michael Brown’s mother wept out, said,

Weeping in the showed-me Missouri

Amorality of the television screen:

 

 "Because you bring them down to this type of level where they feel they don't got nothing to live for anyway! (They feel) they gonna try to take me out anyway!"

 

Weeping in the showed-me Missouri

Near the mighty Mississippi, Michael Brown’s mother

Authorized grief to bring her words to thee,

Old put out the sun god, put out the moon god,

Put out the universe god.

 

 

And the big animal wearing the badge of authority called

All the little animals wearing no authority to be angry,

Just rudely,grassrootly nude in the no-clothing of angry,

Running and grabbing and shouting ancient sonics –-

Out of their minds but in yours----

The big animal called all the little animals

Washed in the blood of the Lamb’s confusion

 

“Anymules. Fucking anymules,”

Using the authority of his authority ,

Justifying, certifying, sanctifying

The sport the god of violence has with men.

 

Try to write down as many of the signs as you can,

Try to get as many of the people’s documents as you can.

Slaughter us with remembering this is not a modest proposal

In forty-one Baraka verses which are also curses,

This is not a proposal for anybody’s death, this is not a poem.

This is not a retold how somebody blue/blew up American again.

 

I smell blood and black fire! Blood and black fire!

I see /hear an American mother crying. A son dying. I see a father with a sign.

I remember since before eternity what the god of violence ordains.

 

And this is not a poem.

This is a eulogy for a dead rainbow.

 

LET THE SHIT HIT THE FAN.

I SMELL BLACK FIRE AND BLOOD

AND BLACK BLOOD AND FIRE

AND THE FINALITY THAT IS THE GENESIS.

 

AND WILL THE FURIOUS FLOWER  BLOOM ON THE GRAVE OF MICHAEL BROWN?

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.    August 11, 2014

 

 

 

MLA's Recognition

MLA’s Moment of Recognition

 

 

Finally, after 27 years, a few members of the Modern Language Association have begun to recognize a “truth” promoted by The English Coalition Conference: Democracy through Language, July 6-24, 1987.

 

The College Strand of the conference suggested

 

 “All English majors should practice writing in several modes and for different audiences and purposes, with an awareness of the social implications and theoretical issues these shifts raise.  Classroom practice should bring teachers and students to experience writing, reading, listening, and speaking as integrated, mutually supporting exercises”(35).

 

The Secondary Strand produced an allied “truth.”

 

“The act of writing itself helps writers discover relationships among pieces of information acquired from disparate sources.  How one thinks is inevitably exposed in writing, so fellow students and teachers (through discussion) can validate a student’s ability to formulate ideas” (21)

 

The Elementary Strand inscribed a third “truth” as an article of belief.

 

“Because language is integral to thinking and to human interaction, we believe children should leave elementary school knowing about language  ---  that is, knowing how to read, write, speak, and listen, and knowing why language and literacy are so central to their lives” (3)

 

These quotations from The English Coalition Conference: Democracy through Language (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1989) edited by Richard Lloyd-Jones and Andrea A. Lunsford are refracted in Jean Ferguson Carr’s “Composition, English, and the University” PMLA 129.3 (2014): 435-441.  Carr concludes that English studies needs “to remind the public at large of the value it offers students” and “to open a more generous conversation with composition, a conversation that might help English refigure the shape and trajectory of that advanced study”(440).  The advanced study to which Carr refers is the sophisticated scholarship prized by many MLA members, scholarship that frequently regrets the need of elementary, secondary, and college students to master the basics of reading, writing, and now computing by way of digital humanities.  Carr’s conclusion may be preaching to the National Council of Teachers of English choir, but it promises to wake up those MLA members who think themselves too good to dirty their hands with the work of teaching writing and with the actual needs of students and who believe they are entitled by virtue of their doctoral degrees to be paid to indulge themselves in the pleasures of obscurity.

 

Obscurity is out; labor is in. Life demands labor. The sooner professors and graduate students in English at PWIs accept the “truths” universally acknowledged by those who do the work of teaching writing at HBCUs, the better. Since the nineteenth century, the work associated with the teaching of composition and literature has been, to use the prized scholarly cliché, always already foundational and fundamental among HBCUs.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                            August 6, 2014

Zionism, Equality, and Ice

BECOMING ICE IN A SUMMER NIGHT

Two essays in the August 14, 2014 issue of The New York Review of Books light the fire of moral meditation and invite despair.  Who needs a fire at the very peak of summer in New Orleans?

Jonathan Freedland’s “The Liberal Zionist” (20, 22, 24) and Gordon Woods’s “A Different Idea of Our Declaration” (37-38) incite thinking.  Walking us through the mindscape of conflict between the Palestinians and Israel with Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, John B. Judis’s Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict, and Norman G. Finkelstein’s Old Wine, Broken Bottle: Ari Shavit’s Promised Land as guidebooks, Freedland points out the beautiful horrors of hasbara, yorim u’vochim, mizrachim, and the Holocaust as demonic prototypes for Israeli fascism.

Two of Freedland’s sentences are especially disconcerting: [1] “On this Shavit and Judis agree: Zionism’s founding fathers were afflicted by selective blindness, unable or unwilling to register what was in front of their eyes: the presence of another people in the Land of Israel” (22) and [2] “In November 1929, Brandeis wrote: ‘The situation reminds me of that in America when the settlers who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony had to protect themselves against the Indians’.” (22)

The latter sentence is a bridge to Gordon Woods’s ideas about Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. Woods’s review of what he describes as Allen’s “tour de force of close textual analysis” (38) is less disturbing than what Freedland had to say about liberal Zionists, but it does contain one fatal flaw in choice of language. Woods makes a brief reference to Allen’s “background as a mixed-race African-American woman” (37). He should have written that Allen’s background is that of a “mixed-race WASP-American woman.” It is embarrassing that he denies Allen the entitlements and equality of her WASP ancestry, that he is as colorblind and insensitive as the Declaration of Independence in acknowledging how the construction of race in the United States constipates thinking. I am led to wonder if Allen notes anywhere in her book that the American concept of equality is predicated, in part, on ethnic cleansing and enslavement. Perhaps she does not, because “she wants to make the ‘encounter with the Declaration easier for readers who have not yet built up a deep historical knowledge base’” (38).

Who needs a fire at the very peak of summer in New Orleans?  I do. The two essays leave me as cold as the Arctic Circle. They freeze me into thinking the indigenous peoples of the United States and the Palestinians are merely items in a lexicon used to justify American and Israeli moral corruptions. They employ biblical mythology to tempt me into assigning Palestinians and indigenous peoples to oblivion. The language of the two essays makes me shiver as Thomas Jefferson did when he considered that God might indeed be just, for I must weigh the possibility that contemporary Americans are losing the capacity to shiver.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                            July 28, 2014

On Black Magnolias: A Literary Journal

On Black Magnolias: A Literary Journal

To my knowledge, we have not had a critical survey of African American literary magazines since 1979, the year Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson published the seminal Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Aesthetics, propaganda, and the rise, fall, and rebirth of magazines and human consciousness are vexed topics.  A few of us do want to know how magazines have functioned since the 1980s, and we might ask, for example, how Black Magnolias has influenced thinking since the turn of the century. Discovering an answer requires use of an array of research procedures.

One might argue Black Magnolias: A Literary Journal is an exemplar of Black South differentness. Is that differentness located in the style and content of what the editor chose to publish; in the expectations of the journal’s readers; in both? Evidence regarding such commerce in values is largely digital --- emails to and from the editor, a review on Newpages.com, comments on various blogsites. The relative absence of print documents demands skills in using printable documents, skills yet emerging within the nascent fields of digital humanities. The current state of African American literary sociology is less than helpful in trying to confirm one’s intuitions.

 Founded in 2001 by Monica Taylor-McInnis and C. Liegh McInnis, Black Magnolias has been a forum for writers who bring diverse cultural assumptions and rhetorical skills to the act and art of writing. Under the editorial guidance of C. Liegh McInnis, the journal has acquired regional, national and international recognition. While these facts may be more apparent than facts regarding “differentness,” interpretation is still limited to intelligent guessing. Comparison of Black Magnolias with similar journals is essential for obtaining what can count as knowledge. Much time is required to do the focused research and construct better explanations than are currently available in general discussions of literary politics.

It is a matter of raw common sense that writers published in Black Magnolias 1.1 (Winter 2001-2002) through 8.2 (Summer 2014) are indebted to C. Liegh McInnis for how he has placed them in the Zeitgeist of the 21^st century. He has sacrificed much of his own career as a poet, fiction writer, and literary/cultural critic in order to serve a higher human good in the philosophical sense of “good.” He has quarreled endlessly with himself about the ethics of publishing, as he sought to balance his heavy teaching duties at Jackson State University with the equally heavy obligations of exercising integrity as an editor. Such uneasy waltzing is usually not accounted for in literary histories. It should  be acknowledged, however, in African American literary history if only to witness how faithfully as a writer McInnis has honored imperatives set forth by Margaret Walker in her essays regarding African American humanistic responsibilities.

The publication of Black Magnolias 8.2 is the turning point which provides an opportunity for acknowledgement. Both the journal and McInnis are entering an unspecified period of meaningful hibernation. I hasten to note that McInnis’s reasons for retreat into reflective solitude are more genuine and noble than those of the nameless narrator in Ellison’s Invisible Man. We might read or reread the 30 issues of Black Magnolias from 2001 to 2014 as a gesture of securing memory of what McInnis has contributed to the totality of African American literary enterprises, securing memory of his gifts to humanity. He has earned to right to renew himself in solitude.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                 July 27, 2014

Margaret Walker Centennial

Margaret Walker’s Gifts for Her People

 

Preface for the 2015 Margaret Walker Centennial

                    

Although The Gift of Black Folk (1924) is less well-known and less discussed than The Souls of Black Folk (1903), this historical survey by W. E. B. DuBois can be instructive as an early example of Black Studies. “Who made America?” DuBois asked in the first sentence of his brief “Prescript.” In the first quarter of the twentieth-century, the question was necessary DuBois argued because “there are those as always who would forget the humble builders, toiling wan mornings and blazing noons, and picture Americas as the last reasoned blossom of mighty ancestors; of those great and glorious world builders and ruler who know and see and do all things forever and ever, amen!” The flowery prose is a negative imitation of prayer, a prelude to DuBois’ understanding that America involved building “real democracy and not that vain and eternal striving to regard the world as the abiding place of exceptional genius with great black wastes of hereditary idiots.” His sarcasm is nicely pitched in the third, final paragraph: “We who know may not forget but must forever spread the splendid sordid truth that out of the most lowly and persecuted of men, Man made America.  And that what Man has here begun with all its want and imperfection, with all its magnificent promise and grotesque failure will some day blossom in the souls of the Lowly” (1). Black assessment of America is forever and ever salted with ironies.

DuBois’ “splendid sordid truth” reveals a deliberate shortcoming in his historical memory, because he failed to deal forthrightly with the “forced complicity” of black folk in the genocide of indigenous peoples in America.  The obvious limits of his historical narration or historiography still plague contemporary discussions of how black folk fit into the unfinished process of building America (forming the nation’s identity), because cultural discourses are subjective; purpose rather than not having all the facts  governs our selectivity.  Acquiring “new,” reliable facts, of course, does encourage revision or correction of history; so too, our efforts to improve and expand our assessments of writers inform our work as literary theorists, critics, and historians, although we are not immune to subjectivity.

 The Gifts of Black Folk offers a guide for talking about Margaret Walker’s gifts for her people, a guide from an African American intellectual giant for whom she had lifelong respect. If quantity of output were the only measure, it is obvious that DuBois gave more gifts to his people than Walker.  My motives for talking about Walker have little to do with quantity and much to do with a sense that the quality of her ideas and her creative works has not been emphasized enough in a field where DuBois’ quantity and quality have been richly documented.  DuBois’ nine chapters provide handy categories for discussion of Walker’s gifts   ---- exploration, labor, military service, emancipation of democracy, reconstruction of freedom, womanhood, folk song (music), art and literature, and spirit. Walker never served in the United States military, so I substitute “political investments” for “military service.” I replace DuBois’ emphasis on geographical exploration with exploration of ideas. What might we gain now from Margaret Walker’s gifts for people?

 

WORK CITED

DuBois, W. E. B. The Gift of Black Folk. Boston: The Stratford Company, 1924; New York: Washington Square Press, 1970. Print.

                                     

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

July 22, 2014