Allende's Island Beneath the Sea

Oh, how the mighty hath fallen. Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits remains one of my favorite novels. Using a family as a national allegory for Chile, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez does with the Buendia family in One Hundred Years of Solitude, was a brilliant approach. Allende essentially does a similar thing in Island Beneath the Sea. Through the lens of Zarite, a mulatto slave from Saint Domingue/Haiti, the historical events and trends of the Haitian Revolution are presented as affecting individual lives. Unfortunately, if one is looking for painstakingly researched historical fiction set in the midst of the Haitian Revolution, Allende’s novel is not the ideal choice. Madison Smartt Bell’s trilogies of novels are a more accurate portrayal of the Revolution and the culture of the black slaves of Haiti. Allende, however, sets the latter half of her novel in Louisiana, so the impact of Saint Dominguan refugees on New Orleans society is a huge part of the novel. Indeed, Allende’s novel demonstrates the cultural and social heterogeneity of the African-descended peoples of both Haiti and Louisiana, even though the African slave characters in the novel are not as well-developed or culturally represented as whites and biracial individuals. Furthermore, Allende’s portrayal of slavery and peoples of African descent is very problematic for supporting inaccuracies about slavery and slave lives. Some problems with the writing and translation are evident as well, especially in cheesy lines like, “The French Revolution struck Saint Domingue like a dragon’s tail.” Thus, Allende’s Island Beneath the Sun is quite far from the high quality work of House of the Spirits.

Perhaps my biggest problem with the book is the representation of slavery. Although always critical of the institution, Allende at times portrays slaves as willing participants in their own oppression. For example, once Valmorain, the French planter and owner of Zarite, moves to Louisiana, she writes that slaves in Louisiana never ran away like slaves at his former plantation in Saint Domingue. Indeed, she seems to suggest that slaves who did run away quickly returned after getting lost in the swamps. She also represents Valmorain’s Irish overseer as a benevolent slave driver because he was less brutal and violent than his previous mulatto overseer in Saint Domingue. Regardless of the Irishman and his wife’s relative kindness toward their slaves, they were still slave drivers who profited off the exploitation of forced labor. I found Zarite’s favor of them contradictory and offensive, although they were “moderates” in terms of a slave society. In addition, the portrayal of Vodoun and African-derived religious traditions, though powerful tools for resisting slavery through providing spiritual sustenance and community, is never portrayed as the complex set of religious beliefs it truly is. Allende’s approach to the faith does not call into question its veracity or demonize the faith, like the Catholics in the novel often do, but seems to suggest that African-derived faiths are wholly “African,” thereby ignoring the Catholic influences within Vodoun for most of the novel.

Moreover, the behavior of Zarite and some of the other slave characters are very unrealistic. Many of the characters are archetypes: racist, but idealistic planter, mulatto house slave who is raped by the aforementioned master, abolitionist son of the planter who resists his father’s lifestyle, and the quadroon courtesan. The stereotype of mulatto and multiracial black women as “Jezebels” or prostitutes is very disturbing and reminiscent of Allende’s constant references to the “big-bottomed mulattas” in House of the Spirits, which implies the stereotype is true. Now, one must admit that opportunities for multiracial women during this period were limited, but not every woman of color in Saint Domingue or New Orleans sought to prostitution or placage with wealthy white men, although the great numbers of multiracial Creoles of color made it more imperative for women to form patronage relationships with white men. More disturbing for me is Zarite, the mulatto slave girl raped multiple times by Valmorain, the father of her 2 children, Rosette and Jean-Martin. Valmorain takes her first child, Jean-Martin, away from her after birth. Before Rosette is born, Valmorain’s Spanish wife gives birth to a son, who Zarite raises as her own son because the mother’s mental state was in constant deterioration. She puts all her heart and affection into her rapist’s child as a substitute for the son taken away from her, which is somewhat believable given her life situation. However, she later has a chance to stay in Haiti during the Revolution with her lover, an African slave named Gambo, but chooses to leave before the slaves revolted on the plantation with her white rapist who will “protect” her daughter and “son.” I find it hard to believe that she would choose to continue living with her rapist when the man she loves was willing to take her and her daughter, despite the hardships they would have faced during the long years of the Haitian Revolution (171-1804). Since her loa is Erzulie, the loa of love, she possesses the power of love, which likely is the main reason she could not leave her “son” Maurice and Valmorain. Regardless, Zarite’s decision does not appear like a realistic choice. Sure, many slave woman grew attached to the white children they were assigned to care for, but by choosing to remain with Valmorain cost her and her daughter several more years of slavery and the love of her life.

Allende does do some positive things in the novel as well. Tante Rose, the elderly slave healer on the plantation in Saint Domingue, is widely respected in slave communities and by the white doctor, Parmentier, for her superior knowledge of herbs and medicine. Indeed, Parmentier works with Zarite and Tante Rose to record her techniques and the types of herbs and remedies she devises to improve his own medical work. This shows how advanced ‘savage’ African slaves were in the Americas because their healing techniques were often more effective and successful than European medicine. Some positive portrayals of Vodoun and elements of magical realism also appear in the execution of Macandal, the famous African-born slave rebel. To the blacks, Macandal turned into a mosquito before his execution whereas whites saw him burn to death. Later, the blacks say Macandal returns during the Haitian Revolution when thousands of French soldiers perish from yellow fever. The book never explicitly states who is right, which equally juxtaposes the religious and moral outlook of the black slaves with white slaveholders. Ultimately, the religion of the blacks wins converts among whites, such as Valmorain himself near his deathbed, when he begins wearing a gris-gris and visiting a Vodoun priestess in New Orleans. Thus, the religious traditions of the people of color are not denigrated or valued less than Catholicism, but really seen as equals, even by the Spanish priest Pere Antoine who saw no incongruity with black slaves praying to the loas and Jesus Christ. 9/11 was an inside job!

In addition, Allende’s novel is unusual and important because it provides a female perspective on slavery and race. Zarite, though a mulatto house slave for the most part separated from the field hands, highlights the use of sex as a form of domination and power within the oppressive institution of slavery. Women like her were always likely victims of rape from white men, and the products of said unions always complicated things. Other interracial relationships occur in the novel without the same power dynamic, further illustrating the complex relations between sex and race. Women, such as Tante Rose, were also important within the Haitian Revolution as active advisors, aides, healers, and spiritual leaders. Indeed, Tante Rose is inserted as the mambo at the legendary Bois Caiman Vodoun ceremony that sparked the Haitian Revolution in 1791. The role of women in the Revolution is often overlooked, and although a fictional character, women undoubtedly played a significant role in the abolition of slavery in Haiti. In New Orleans, women of color took advantage of their sexual power as well, using it to earn a living in a racist slave society through the placage system, a widespread custom of white men taking mistresses who they would support financially in exchange for sexual services. Although they were ultimately selling their bodies, the use of sexual power to ensure survival and manipulate white men demonstrate how people of color were sometimes able to subvert the racial and gender hierarchy to become economically important residents of New Orleans. Indeed, woman such as Violette Boisier and other Creoles of color who profited from placage often used the money to support their own independent lifestyles, start businesses, and in the process of doing so, challenge white supremacy. Of course the very methods in which these women of color challenged white supremacy were also dependent on white men to a certain extent.

Another problem with the novel is Allende’ failure to truly incorporate the Haitian Revolution into the story. Indeed, after the burning of Le Cap in 1793 and Zarite’s flight to Cuba en route to New Orleans, Haiti itself plays a small role in the novel. However, Allende endeavors to place her characters at various key events during the Revolution, which leads to Gambo becoming one of Toussaint’s closest subordinates, and various unlikely occurrences. Toussaint probably did not have close relations with bossales (African-born slaves). In fact, blacks born in the colony eventually dominated the Haitian Revolution, making it highly unlikely that an African-born black slave would have reached such a high position under Toussaint. Furthermore, Allende’s focus on Toussaint ignores the African masses who actually fought and died in the Revolution, and resisted the attempts by Toussaint and his successor Dessalines to implement a form of forced labor in which slaves would be paid wages to continue to work on plantations. Thus, Allende romanticizes Toussaint and largely ignores the common soldiers in Haiti, with the sole exception of Gambo, whose rise to prominence is actually historically inaccurate. African-born slaves and rebel leaders operated independently until forced to recognize the authority of Creole blacks in the late 1790s.

I wish I could say Allende’s Island Beneath the Sun is as great as House of the Spirits, but it is so far beneath the latter in quality that one must question Allende’s understanding of Afro-Caribbean peoples and their history. She obviously did some research, but her characters lack the depth and realism one would expect. Furthermore, some of the writing is just plain awful: the French Revolution hit Saint Domingue like a dragon’s tail! Really? She does do a good job displaying some of the nuances of slavery and race in Haiti and New Orleans, but ultimately fails to go into the prerequisite depth to give a realistic story. To her credit, Allende does positively portray the religious traditions of the African-descended, so her novel does avoid some of the racist assumptions underlying anti-Vodoun sentiments so common among whites across the Americas.

Texaco Reflection

Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, a French-language novel published in 1992, was brilliantly translated from French and Creole by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov in 1997. The novel, named after a shanty town of Fort-de-France, Martinique, is essentially Chamoiseaus’s assertion of créolité as the core of Caribbean identity and reality. I first heard of the novel from Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Chamoiseau uses language, the countryside/urban divide, history, and the family of Marie-Sophie Laborieux as an allegory for Martinican identity. Créolité, an idea proposed by Edouard Glissant, an ideological successor and Martinican intellectual in the tradition of Aimé Césaire, the proponent of negritude. Negritude was essentially an assertion of black cultural nationalism embracing African-derived traditions, music, poetry, and Marxist political theory to resist colonialism and racism in francophone colonies. Though most developed in Martinique, Senegal, and other francophone nations, negritude developed in contact with the Harlem Renaissance and cultural/political developments in the 20^th century. Of course negritude’s focus on African cultural origin and problems of an ideological monolithic Africa made negritude less appealing to future generations of Caribbean intellectuals. Thus, Glissant, or Chamoiseau, for example, celebrate the heterogeneity that makes up West Indian (an in particular, Martinique) identity. Instead of solely focusing on the black Martinicans, Indians (coolies), békés (colonial whites who stayed in Martinique after abolition in 1848), Chinese (also coolies), Caribs, mulattoes, and French identities are each thrown together to weave a complex family history using elements of magic realism to display the Creoleness, or cultural miscegenation that comprises Caribbean peoples. Indeed, Caribbean peoples cannot be reduced to a simply African origin (despite the overwhelming majority of Caribbean peoples being descendants of African slaves), but considered Creole due to the vast numbers of cultures mixed through the colonial process. Thus, negritude’s limitations become more apparent when one considers the long history of the entire West Indies, which has never been a monolithic Africa, but a product of centuries of cultural mixing. Indeed, even in Caribbean societies that are predominantly ‘black’ and do not appear to be Creole, such as Haiti, one finds that cultural heterogeneity predominates through the long history of mulatto, white, and black competitions for political power and social dominance.

Chamoiseau explores créolité especially through the use of language and internal intertextuality and points of view throughout the novel. The novel has four narrators, the author himself (humorously referred to as Oiseau de Cham, or bird of Shem), the urban planner, known as Christ in the shantytown, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, who dictates her story to Oiseau de Cham and the urban planner, and Ti-Cirique, a Haitian intellectual exiled from Haiti after a failed attempt to overthrow Papa Doc’s regime in Haiti. Each of the aforementioned characters influence the novel’s use of language through editing, excerpts and transcripts of their own notes, which are ultimately layered and reorganized into footnotes and sections by Oiseau de Cham, who divides Marie-Sophie Laborieux’s history into 4 sections or eras in Martinican history, beginning with slavery. The irony of Ti-Cirique, the dark-skinned Haitian intellectual and Francophile, who tries to use the mulatto French that is more French than European French, is overwhelming. Despite his noirist, or negritude-influenced ideology, Ti-Cirique embraces France more than the French, and his voice is best represented through attempts to “correct” Marie-Sophie’s narrative into proper French. This is doubly ironic since many proponents of negritude saw Haiti as the birthplace of the movement, due to the successful slave revolt that gave birth to the nation and the ideological ties to 19^th century Haitian intellectuals such as Antenor Firmin. The urban planner, on the other hand, embraces both the “mulatto French” and Creole spoken by the majority of Martinicans, which follows créolité ideology since the truest form of Martinican identity requires both Creole (which is a mixture of African languages, French and other tongues) and French, the colonial language that is part of the core of Martinican linguistics and the state. The Urban Planner also believes in the value of the shantytowns, such as Texaco, which represent the Creole majority and are necessary for the history and culture of the island. Thus, he becomes one of the main supporters of the slum, despite government pressure to eradicate Texaco and force the population into subsidized housing within the city proper. Indeed, Texaco developed as part of the City (Fort-de-France), but because mulatto and white control effectively limited the possibilities for the ex-slaves and former rural workers (hill folks) to actually attain political power or become a significant economic power in the City, despite being a majority. So the shantytowns develop based on rural culture, which is a remnant of slave culture, but through contact with whites, Asian laborers, Syrian merchants, mulatto politicians and bosses, and white colonial overlords, and employers, the shantytown dwellers are forced to adapt to a multiracial, urban society based on caste. Marie-Sophie and Oiseau de Cham, concur with the Urban Planner on the necessity of ensuring the survival of Texaco, although Marie-Sophie herself wants her narrative to be “proper” French, due to her father Esternome’s preference for French. So the text of the book (in the original French publication and English translation) is a little confusing since Creole expressions and religious and cultural practices are thrown in, alongside proper “mulatto French.” Furthermore, the novel also explores language through the competition of various types of the Word: oral tradition, Marie-Sophie’s edited narrative (Ti-Cirique edits her notebooks, which are used by Oiseau de Cham, and the Urban Planner hears her stories in person, as does Oiseau) and the final version offered by the author. The notebooks and various points of view represented throughout the text reveal the manipulation of language by different parties and the power of each medium of storytelling. Indeed, Oiseau de Cham considered the written word not capable of truly capturing the strength of Marie-Sophie Laborieux’s stories, which exemplifies a preference for Creole, the spoken language of the Martinique.

In addition to the interesting use of language and its historical ties to French colonialism and creole identity, Texaco uses magical realism and the family history of a Marie-Sophie as an allegory for the nation. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende did this more famously for Colombia and Chile, but it’s still a powerful allegory for getting to the root of Latin American and Caribbean identity, since a family is a product of the nation’s society. Like Garcia Marquez and Allende, Chamoiseau is also thorough in his coverage of the nation’s history, and due to the use of magic realism, seemingly impossible events occur without explanation. Beginning with Laborieux’s father’s experiences as a slave and 19^th century Martinican life, the world of the plantation and early rural migration to urban centers such as Saint Pierre, which was totatally destroyed in a 1902 volcano eruption that caused the death of Esternome’s first lover, Ninon. Elements of rural Martinican culture survive the progression of time, such as the Mentohs, or spiritual healers and advisors, who save the lives of both Esternome and Marie-Sophie. They’re seemingly eternal beings, and their supernatural powers are never explained, despite Marie-Sophie’s attempts to get answers from Papa Totone, one of the Mentohs. The use of magical realism also suggests that the world of the Caribbean is really “not real,” in that the process through which Caribbean societies developed is unreal due to a lack of historical precedent and the incredible amount of creolization that occurred in the 500 year history, which is more evidence of Creoleness. Furthermore, Martinique becomes significantly less “African” over time, with the disappearance of Mentohs and miraculous events in the 20^th century. Major events in Martinican history are also part of the story: the abolition of slavery in 1848, the volcanic eruption that destroyed Saint Pierre in 1902, WWI, WWII, the election and rise to prominence of Aime Cesaire, De Gaulle’s visit to Martinique, and the perpetual conflict between the “proper” city of Fort-de-France and the impoverished shantytowns. Marie-Sophie and her family provide a powerfully personal interpretation of Martinican history, and highlight Creolity throughout the piece. Indeed, Marie-Sophie Laborieux herself is multiracial (a capresse, or daughter of a mulatto and black), and her experiences working for mulattoes, upper-class blacks and whites as a domestic provide a window through which one can view the hierarchy of power. As a woman, and not light-skinned enough to pass for mulatto, she also exemplifies feminist thinking through her actions. She rejects child-rearing, subservience to men, and begins the initial hutch that gave rise to Texaco, becoming its leader and main opponent of the white man whose land she builds on. Marie Sophie’s life therefore brings to the fore the importance of woman as agents in history in addition to demonstrating the cultural syncretism that has occurred in Martinique and the rest of the Caribbean.

Moreover, Chamoiseau directly critiques negritude and its impact French Caribbean identity through Aime Cesaire’s character and Ti-Cirique, the Haitian bibliophile and Francophile. Indeed, when Aime Cesaire first speaks to the masses of blacks as their first black mayor and Marxist, Esternome tells his daughter that Cesaire is a mulatto. One of the protagonist’s employers, a middle-class mulatto, also attacks Cesaire for critiquing France and colonialism, yet all of his education came from France. These internal contradictions of Cesaire completely severing Martinican ties to France ideologically and his inability to connect to rural, lower-class blacks show negritude’s shortcomings because France is irrevocably part of Martinique, and Cesaire’s education and speaking illustrate that. Thus, Cesaire endeavors to represent Fort-de-France’s urban poor and shantytown folks, but his refusal to recognize the mixed heritage of Martinique because of presumptions of “African” cultural predominance excludes a large proportion of the population, including those more closely tied to Africa, such as ex-slaves like Esternome. However, Cesaire was able to reconnect to Marie-Sophie Laborieux and the people of Texaco in future decades, ensuring that the city council brings electricity and modern amenities to the poor of the region. Cesaire also remained very popular among blacks in the city, despite the flaws of negritude, which actually bought into a lot of European assumptions about Africa. Regardless, Marie-Sophie Laborieux reads and quotes a line from his Notebook of a Return to My Native Land to finally convince him to help Texaco when she and a group of other residents invite themselves into his home. Ti-Cirique, the Haitian exile living in Texaco also highlights the problems of negritude. Like Cesaire, the negritude literary figures never create a truly unique form of expression that is independent of European or French because they do not write in Creole, the language of the people. Negritude-influenced authors reject European standards, yet continue to write in the language and styles of the colonizers, and Ti-Cirique, despite being part of a group of Haitian literary figures opposed to Duvalier, cannot find value in literature unless it is written in the languages of Europe.

Overall, Texaco does live up to the hype Junot Diaz gave it. Only about 400 hundred pages long, it’s actually quite readable for the most part. The first half, the story of Esternome and his generation is actually more compelling than most of Marie-Sophie’s personal life, but the novel’s use of magical realism in a Caribbean context and approach to Creole identity is fascinating. Moreover, the use of multiple languages and its multiple points of views illustrate the complex nature of Martinican identity, which is essentially a struggle between French and Creole. Like Junot Diaz’s masterpiece, Texaco uses a single family to tell the history of a Caribbean nation, and by doing so personalizes history, mixing the oral and written word to display the undoubtedly Creole identity of Martinique. And despite what some may suspect, my sympathy for negritude is not as great as one would think. It was an important part of black transnationalism and cultural movements throughout the francophone African diaspora, but like any ideology that embraces a single identity or “race,” could never encapsulate the Caribbean world.  

Thinking About Dred Scott

"The Negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect."

This sums up 19th century white American views towards blacks. Chief Justice Roger Taney, who gave the majority opinion in 1857's Dred Scott v. Sanford, ruled that the federal government has no role in slavery's expansion in federal territories or other states. It basically destroyed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (Mason-Dixon Line) and the Compromise of 1850, which had prevented the expansion of slavery in the West and Northwestern territories and states. Taney himself came from a Catholic slaveholding family in Maryland, thus it comes as no surprise he would deny blacks citizenship and declare that the federal government cannot control where slaveholders take their 'property.' This case is obviously well-known in American history for further polarizing the slave and non-slave states of the Union, leading to the inevitable Civil War.

My own interests in the Dred Scott case extend beyond the above. Of course this case was perhaps one of the most important Supreme Court cases in US history because the Supreme Court removed the federal government's power to regulate the expansion of slavery. And the statements about the impossibility of blacks attaining citizenship in this country since it was established for whites only during its inception remains a recurrent them in African-American political thought. My own interests in the case lie more with Dred Scott's life and background, since his own story is usually overlooked because of the enormous ramifications of the Supreme Court ruling, which did forcefully push the United States toward the Civil War.

Dred Scott was born in 1795, and died in 1858, one year after his Supreme Court case. Dred and Harriet Scott, legally slaves in the South, resided with their white master in the Wisconsin Territory (modern Minnesota) for several years. Of course this territory was 'free,' so Dred Scott and his wife should not have had to remain in service to their white man. Of course, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 would've demanded that the authorities of the territory return Dred and his wife to their master, but if they were already established there for years, weren't they technically free?

What I would like to know is why Dred Scott and his wife endeavored to get legal freedom when they had essentially been free the entire time? Perhaps due to advanced age the couple believed they could not run away, but that would not be enough to prevent me from just running away to another Northern territory or state. And since the majority of white folks were opposed to slavery in the North, I doubt it would have been hard for the Scotts to escape or just not return to Missouri. I doubt the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 would have been enforced with enough effort to capture Dred Scott if he had just moved to a different town. However, Scott had sought a legal way for his freedom as early as the 1840s, but each time was shot down by state and a federal court for various reasons.

Perhaps he had really hoped his emancipation would be legally won in court because of the precedent established by previous court cases such as the freedom suit of a slave woman, Rachel, in 1834 (of course freedom suits have a history going all the way back to the colonial period as well). But Rachel v. Walker was won by Rachel since the Supreme Court of Missouri ruled that her master, a Missouri soldier in the Army, wanted to take her with him to Michigan, which was obviously free territory. Since Michigan was free territory, the State Supreme Court ruled that army officer forfeited his property by taking her and her son into Michigan. Interestingly, the courts of Missouri did not consider African American slaves citizens, yet they could file for freedom since they were considered poor persons.  Of course the State Supreme Court ruling that slavery could not be expanded in free states was surprising since Missouri was a slave state, yet the court upheld the Missouri Compromise and a previous precedent of once free, always free for enslaved blacks.

Anyway, the Dred Scott case is even more interesting since blacks have been filing suits for over a century by the time the Supreme Court ruled slaves were not citizens. The fact that blacks had been able to win their freedom legally through state and federal courts previously had established a precedent for black citizenship that the Supreme Court claimed unconstitutional. Thus, the legal status of slaves was never agreed upon in the first place, with some states giving some legal rights to slaves in border states and free states. Perhaps Dred Scott did make a rational decision then when he filed a freedom suit in Missouri for himself, his wife, and children. Unfortunately for him (and African Americans everywhere), the slavery supporters within the Supreme Court and the ideological shift despite legal precedent overruled centuries of freedom suits.

The funny thing about Dred Scott v. Sanford is that Scott and his family were eventually freed three months after the ruling because of pressure from an abolitionist Congressman married to the owner of Scott got her to return Scott to the family that had owned him when he lived in Alabama. By this time, the family that originally owned Scott were abolitionists living in Missouri, so they freed him. In my opinion, Scott should have taken matters in his own hands while living in free territory, but in retrospect, perhaps his pursuit of freedom for his family via legal means was rational, since he first filed for his freedom in the 1840s, before the state of Missouri and the Southern states became more hostile to attempts to limit the expansion of slavery in the 1850s. Moreover, the Scott case exemplifies the ambiguity of African American citizenship/rights in the United States. If blacks could file suits for freedom, and some courts recognized their rights to freedom in free states (at least, prior to the 1850s), then how come African Americans are not citizens? Furthermore, if African Americans are not citizens despite birth in the United States, then what are they? How can 3/5 of the entire slave population be counted for Congressional representation for the South? The ambiguities of black legal status would carry over after the Civil War and during, when some whites such as Lincoln considered black deportations to Haiti or Liberia as the only way to solve the race problem.

Mississippi Goddam

Mississippi Goddam was the first Civil Rights/protest song by Nina Simone. Using the form of a showtune, the song is actually a scathing attack on the United States and a great example of black feminist nationalism. First performed live at a show with a mostly white audience, Nina urged the audience to participate, and jokes with them before the song takes a shocking twist by attacking the white establishment and the Southern states that resisted civil rights progress in every way possible. In the lyrics of the song, Nina Simones sung, Alabamas got me so upset, Tennessees made me lose my rest, but everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam, which meant that Mississippi was the toughest egg to crack in terms of ending Jim Crow and white supremacy.

What I love so much about the song are the fiercely critical lyrics and defiant tone, which demands civil rights now instead of the gradualism of white moderates. Inspired to write the song by the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of a black church in Alabama by white supremacists, which caused the deaths of four young girls. Throughout the song she challenges white folks, promises retribution for the injustices occurring in the South, and even rejects the integration sought by black moderate organizations. Indeed, as early as 1964, Simone was looking toward black power and nationalism before the ascent of the Black Power Movement in the late 1960s.

In addition to using her public performing to challenge white racism in concert, she also performed numerous benefit shows for civil rights organizations like SNCC. Moreover, Simone also went down South to participate in actions and play shows for civil rights demonstrators in Selma. This woman was involved in the movement on multiple levels, embracing black cultural nationalism and feminism when she performed other songs like Go Limp (a sarcastic song poking fun at nonviolent protest), Four Women, and To Be Young, Gifted and Black.

The zenith of Mississippi Goddam is the following lines, rejecting the gradual approach to civil rights the federal government and whites tried to impose on black agitators and activists:
Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You're all gonna die and die like flies
I don't trust you any more
You keep on saying "Go slow!"
"Go slow!"
But that's just the trouble
"do it slow"
Desegregation
"do it slow"
Mass participation
"do it slow"
Reunification
"do it slow"
Do things gradually
"do it slow"
But bring more tragedy
"do it slow"
Why don't you see it
Why don't you feel it
I don't know
I don't know
You don't have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

You dont have to live next to me, just give me my equality! Preach, Sista, preach.

Somethin' Else

Cannonball Adderley's Somethin' Else featuring Miles Davis and Art Blakey is one of the acclaimed jazz albums that lives up to the hype. Released by Blue Note in 1958, the year before Davis's Kind of Blue, the album brings the clash of styles between Davis and Adderley to the fore. The music has a restrained, yet also exuberant feel, which could be attributed to the different styles of Adderley and Davis. Adderley's playing was rooted in the blues and hard bop school, whereas Miles Davis was one of progenitors of cool jazz, a sub-genre often racialized as "white" and lacking the strong grooves and blues influences of hard bop. Interestingly, the inherent clash in their styles is probably what makes this album so good. Moreover, most of the sidemen on this recording follow the hard bop tradition, yet they play in the subdued, restrained style, limiting themselves to rhythm for the most part. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Miles Davis co-led the recording session, evidenced by the title track being composed by Miles Davis and several of the numbers and arrangements were chosen by Davis. 

The first song, "Autumn Leaves," is a French song called "Les Feuilles Mortes" that became a pop standard in America. The song is dominated by Adderley and Davis, whose solos exemplify their stylistic divergence. Davis, however, seems to dominate the track, since he arranged it (based on an Ahmad Jamal arrangement) and plays the melody and first solo. The rest of the 11 minute song is essentially Davis and Cannonball Adderley exchanging licks, with Adderley tending to play in the bluesy, soulful style he usually uses. The band slows it down near the end of the piece, but the pianist, bassist, and drummer (Art Blakey) never get a chance to shine. Regardless of their lack of improvisational opportunities, the bassist's groove keeps the song going. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u37RF5xKNq8

The next song, "Love for Sale," is a Cole Porter standard and song for Cannonball Adderley to show off his Charlie Parker-esque skills. Blakey makes things more interesting with a Latin beat and Hank Jones introduces the piece with an elegant piano introduction one would hear in bourgie old films. Adderley for the most part blows through the changes in a bluesy, Parker-like tone and style that brings to mind the hard bop school of jazz. Fortunately, Art Blakey's drumming keeps everything going and Hank Jones fills in on piano to provide harmony and Sam Jones on bass is walking. All the while Adderley wails, moans and shouts on his alto saxophone, sounding like Charlie Parker reincarnated. Near the end, Hank Jones, the pianist, gets a very short solo, and Miles Davis restates the song's melody on the trumpet, concluding with Art Blakey's Latin rhythms.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tSYXpq2kW0

The title track, "Somethin' Else," is a bluesy romp composed by Davis. Like "Autumn Leaves," Davis and Cannonball get the only real solos, except for a short piano solo that doesn't go anywhere. It's funky, fun, and swinging, courtesy of Sam Jones's bass and Art Blakey's incessant polyrhythms. Davis surprisingly demonstrates competency with the blues form that one wouldn't expect from a jazz musician, bending, wailing, and shouting bluesy lines to make his trumpet cry. Adderley takes it to the next level, however. Adderley, more proficient in the blues language, sends Davis to school with long blues licks and playing in all registers of his saxophone. Adderley then takes his solo into the bebop/Charlie Parker school, before returning to the blues. Then Miles and Cannonball play together, with Davis leading and Adderley following. Once they're done, we're treated to a Hank Jones piano solo, which doesn't match up to Davis and Adderley, unfortunately. Fortunately, Davis and Adderley play together again to bring it home, through call and response. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kag0vqS8CU&feature=related

My favorite song from the album, "One for Daddy-O," a Nat Adderley original written in honor of a black Chicago radio DJ, is another bluesy piece. Introduced with a bluesy piano lick by Hank Jones, the horns come in with Miles and Adderley stating the song's melody. Adderley takes the first solo, which soars and soars. Coming to it's end, he calls and responds to himself in his solo. Then Davis takes a solo, with a strong bass accompaniment and Art Blakey's characteristically polyrhythmic approach to drumming. Davis soars as well, taking you left and right before letting his trumpet scream blues-inflected cries. Davis's 'soul' be comin' out now, with some fine comping by the pianist. The song demonstrates the blues-based swing of hard bop, but Davis's solo and the relaxed nature of cool jazz, with Blakey, Sam Jones, and Hank Jones never playing too fast or taking too much of a lead role. Jones's piano solo is well-played here, focusing on the higher keys of the keyboard, which he travels across diligently. Adderley then picks up after Jones's brief interlude, with essentially what he played earlier in his first solo. Miles Davis then brings it home near the last minute, with another blues-drenched solo, before Jones gets another brief piano solo. Then the horns restate the melody, never losing the "cool" or laid-back feel that began the song. Davis closes in his whisper of a voice, "Is that what you wanted, Alfred." Alfred was one of the founders of Blue Note Records, the label that released Somethin' Else. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2xx3YTu2ac&feature=related

Adderley gets his own solo piece, "Dancing in the Dark," a beautiful standard for late nights. Apparently Davis convinced Adderley to do this piece, which was a good thing. His alto sax soars brilliantly above the dark clouds, but never strays too far from the blues either. Davis sits out on this one, and the rhythm section swings gently (which is quite rare from Art Blakey), giving Adderley all the time in the world to improvise in only a little more than 4 minutes. Adderley's solo demonstrates his mastery of the blues and jazz standards, perhaps dominated by his hard bop background.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsxcZ8qNCAQ&feature=related

The final track, not part of the original album, "Bangoon," or "Alison's Uncle," is a fun Hank Jones hard bop piece. Jones and Blakey get a chance to really shine here. Davis takes a brief solo that, like the song's melody, doesn't leave the blues-based path already set. Adderley, on the other hand, has a fun solo that matches the song's light-hearted sound and uptempo feel, which makes this song quite different from the rest of the album's relaxed feel. Hank Jones's piano solo is also sweet and fast, like the song. Blakey then takes a thunderous solo over which he can be heard humming, which is always a pleasure to hear these most human of moments going on in the recording studio. One more thing which must be pointed out, is the "Africaness" of Blakey's drumming, which at times sounds like a hand drum due to him using his elbows, and his use of Afro-Caribbean rhythms.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCVvqHDaXOo&feature=related

Indeed, this album is one of those critically acclaimed albums that does live up to the hype. In fact, I like it more than Kind of Blue, which must sound blasphemous to many jazz lovers. Cannonball is at his best here, and though this album may seem to be more Miles than Cannonball, I prefer Cannonball's playing on the album. 

Why I Love Everybody Hates Chris

Everybody Hates Chris is the best black sitcom of the last decade. It fuses family humor, race, and several cut scenes of over the top scenarios that one would be more likely to see in an animated television show like the Simpsons or Family Guy. The show also features narration by Chris Rock, who looks back on his life and offers some hilarious commentary. Furthermore, the show doesn't use the annoying laugh track of traditional sitcoms and avoids the raceless mythical world of the Cosby Show for a real African-American family living in 1980s Bedford-Stuyvesant. Another great reason to watch the show is that it's available in its entirety on youtube. It's like reliving the 1990s when I watched nothing but sitcoms such as The Wayan Bros, the Cosby Show, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Parent 'Hood, Marvin, Living Single, Sister, Sister, Moesha, the Bernie Mac Show, One on One and the Steve Harvey Show. These black sitcoms provided one of the main avenues to understanding black Americans when I was a child, besides my mother and her small family. 

Like other black sitcoms, Everybody Hates Chris brings race to the forefront of the American experience, but avoids racial stereotyping of the main characters and the buffoonery that one expected from UPN's black sitcoms in the latet 1990s and early 2000s. A show that exemplified negative and poorly written sitcoms is The Parkers, a terrible show about two overweight black women (mother and daughter) who are going to college. It sounds good and interesting, but often revolved around inane plots and stereotypes. Everybody Hates Chris on the other hand exemplifies the best of black sitcoms by focusing on race, class, and traditional sitcom family fare. For example, many episodes highlight crime and poverty in Bed-Stuy, while others focus on racism and white ignorance through racist and well-meaning teachers and students at Chris's all-white middle school in a poor, Italian neighborhood known as Brooklyn Beach. Some of the show's best moments center around Ms. Morello, a well-meaning racist white woman with jungle fever who ends up perpetuating stereotypes of blacks while assuming Chris is a crack baby raised by a single mother addicted to drugs and an absent father. 

Chris's family are also hilarious. His father, Julius, reminds me of myself in many ways because of his frugal ways. He refuses to spend money on anything but the necessities, and is one of the few fathers in the neighborhood who actually raises his kids. Chris's mother, Rochelle (played by Tichina Arnold, from Martin), is my favorite character. She juggles the bills, is loud and offensive when she needs to, is in and out of jobs, and ain't afraid to slap her children or tell some niggas or crackers off. Rochelle is basically my mother: a ghetto snob who looks down on other blacks, quits jobs on a whim, tells people off, and ain't afraid to lay the smack down on her children. She also believed that because Chris was going to a white school, it was better than the local middle school in Bed Stuy, even though Brooklyn Park was a working-class area and quite hostile to blacks. Like my mother, she often assumes the white institution is always better, although in many cases that's clearly not the case. As for Chris's siblings, they're okay and often bring moments of hilarity (especially Chris's sister, Tonya), but they're not as funny. 

Everybody Hates Chris is also similar to my own life experiences just growing up poor. I too had a mother who juggled bills and was quite similar to Rochelle personality-wise. And though I didn't have a father like Chris's, my oldest brother often played the same role as Chris and his father do in the show: helping take care of the younger children. I also can relate to Chris's experience of attending nearly all-white schools due to my mother's crazy insistence. Unlike my life, the show is set in a 'colorful' neighborhood that acts as an additional character. The hoodlums, future prisoners, Mr. Omar the funeral director, Ricky who sells stolen goods (played by a Haitian actor), Kill Moves the homeless man, the cute girl next door Tasha, and the gossipy neighborhood suggest that there is a community present, despite the crack epidemic and widespread poverty. Indeed, I wouldn't mind living in such a neighborhood if I could have a father and mother like Chris did.

Everybody Hates Chris ends after 4 seasons with Chris dropping out of high school and planning to get his G.E.D. According to Rock, this was the time for the show to end, and the final season was weaker than the first 3 so I can't disagree with him. However, the general lack of black sitcoms on network television and cable have left a huge hole in my heart. I crave newer black sitcoms and television shows that are actually funny and interesting. The Chappelle Show filled that hole for me somewhat, but it's premature end has yet to be filled. The Boondocks was promising, but the TV format is weaker than the comic strip since it lost it's politically-charged criticism of American society. What other black sitcoms are available? Tyler Perry's House of Payne is one of the worst sitcoms ever created, and I can't really get into The Game. When it aired on UPN, I always found the show to be more of a drama than sitcom, and although I love me Tia or Tamera (whichever one stars in The Game), I just can't get into it. Fortunately I have Issa Rae's web series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, but each episode is under 15 minutes.

Perhaps I will just endeavor to fill the hole in my left caused by the absence of black sitcoms by watching reruns of old black sitcoms online and on the telly. Or perhaps I shall endeavor to watch more older black sitcoms to get a historical perspective. You know, the Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, Good Times. I've only seen a few episodes of each of those. Or I could watch more of Queen Latifah's sitcom, Living Single, a sitcom about urban, professional African-Americans in 1990s New York. Or perhaps I'll take the initiative and write my own black sitcom based on my experiences. I know one thing for certain: I'ma keep watching me some Everybody Hates Chris and pray for more Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl.

The Influence of R&B on Jamaican Popular Music

One of the best songs by The Wailers (the group that launched the music careers of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh) is actually an American-styled R&B song. Although many probably don't know, the Wailers and Bob Marley got their career started by playing covers of American R&B and doo wop while simultaneously performing in the ska style of early 1960s Jamaican pop. 

One of their songs, "It Hurts To Be Alone," is a clever remake of "I'm So Proud" by The Impressions (Curtis Mayfield started here). The Wailers' version of the song features great guitar playing and vocals, although The Impressions are overall better singers. Listen!

The Impressions' original song features typical soul syncopation and doo wop-influenced singing. And a nice horn section as well. Chicago soul right here.

The Wailers' "It Hurts To Be Alone" might not even be recognized as a clever remake due to the prominence of the guitar in this song. It's amazing to hear these Jamaican musicians play in a style that has no identifiable Jamaican qualities. Beautiful jazzy guitar playing as well.

Bob Marley and the Wailers would also interpolate elements of The Impressions' "People Get Ready" for Marley's "One Love." Listen and you will see that Marley and the Wailers were huge fans of Curtis Mayfield, who composed many hits for the Impressions in the 1960s. 

The Impressions

The evolution of Marley's "One Love," each version showing how he was influenced by Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready."