Author Walter Mosley on Writing Mystery Novels, Political Revelation, Racism and Pushing Obama

Author Walter Mosley on Writing Mystery Novels, Political Revelation, Racism and Pushing Obama

Walter Mosley discusses race, society, literature, and politics. He also reveals some obvious truths I should have ascertained already about his life. For example, Easy Rawlins, Mosley's first detective character, represents his father's generation as a black man from the Deep South moving to the North or West (in this case, Los Angeles). Moreover, Mosley is biracial, half white (Jewish mother) and half black! I had never picked up on that in his novels that I have read (Devil in a Blue Dress, A Long Fall, Known to Evil). His detective fiction is some of the best with black protagonists that I have read, surpassing Chester Himes and Rudolph Fisher, author of the A Conjure Man Dies, the first black detective story.

In this interview, Mosley discusses how everyone is mixed-race in America, but nobody talks about it since people continue to define race based on external physical features rather than the long history of racial miscegenation that reveals how more people than one is willing to admit have mixed heritage. Mosley also discusses his own problems with capitalism, alcoholism in his past (that theme does appear in his mystery novels), dishonesty in politics and the War on Terror and his own father's background. His father, from southern Louisiana, essentially raised himself from an early age and served in World War II. His father did not want to go to war, because his father never thought of himself as American in this conflict between Germans and the United States. The very idea of seeing himself as "American" only came from being shot at by Germans while fighting in a segregated unit. In addition, Easy Rawlins, working as a janitor at a school in Los Angeles, was inspired by his own father's experiences as a janitor in LA.

1950s Los Angeles, from a racial point of view, was only colored (black and Latino) and whites. Interracial solidarity among non-whites seemed to have been stronger, according to Mosley from his own experiences. Working-class people of color were thrown together due to the jobs available then. Moreover, Mosley's experiences during the Watts Riots in 1965 are also interesting, since his own father wanted to join in the destruction, but couldn't because he knew it was morally wrong. Mosley also discusses how the urban riots that exploded across black communities in the 1960s represented a shift in the mainstream civil rights movement due to black anger.

The origins of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, featuring Socrates, a natural black philosopher lacking formal education, began with assertions Mosley faced from whites about blacks not being intelligent. I read portions of Always Outnumbered for an American literature course sophomore year in high school, but foolishly did not complete the novel.


His reasoning for choosing mystery novels as his vehicle for self-expression also reveals how insane capitalist distribution of literature is. His first novel, featuring Mouse and Easy Rawlins, was not published because the companies said white folks don't read about blacks, black women don't like black men, and black men don't read! Then Mosley wrote another story with Easy and Mouse, Devil in a Blue Dress, which became a huge success after publication. So Mosley decided to keep writing mystery novels because of their universality, which means that the publishing companies will support him. As Mosley concludes, we live in an oligarchy ruled by corporations because folks aren't pushing. Y'all gotta keep on pushing to get what you want out of this country.

It also becomes obvious why Mosley's newest sleuth, Leonid McGill, had a Communist father. His mother was a communist from New York, which definitely influenced Mosley's own feelings about capitalism and politics.

Great quote from Devil in a Blue Dress:  "Nigger can't pull his way out of the swamp wit'out no help, Easy. You wanna hold on to his house and get some money and have some white girls callin' on the phone? Alright. That's alright. But Easy, you gotta have somebody at yo' back, man. That's just a lie them white men give 'bout makin' it they own. They always got they backs covered."

Lisztomania

Forgot how much I used to love this song...all those white folks from two years ago come to mind since this song and 1901 were their favorite songs to play, in addition to Crown on the Ground by Sleigh Bells. "So sentimental..."

I guess "1901" is good too...

Your Heart Belongs to Me

 
Early Supremes, with laidback, Latin rhythm. Diana may not have had the best voice in The Supremes, she was definitely the best singer.

Just a Closer Walk With Thee

Just a closer walk with Thee,
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea,
Daily walking close to Thee,
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
I am weak, but Thou art strong,
Jesus, keep me from all wrong,
I’ll be satisfied as long
As I walk, let me walk close to Thee.
Through this world of toil and snares,
If I falter, Lord, who cares?
Who with me my burden shares?
None but Thee, dear Lord, none but Thee.
When my feeble life is o’er,
Time for me will be no more,
Guide me gently, safely o’er
To Thy kingdom's shore, to Thy shore

One of my favorite gospel songs, of unknown Southern African-American origins, is "Just a Closer Walk With Thee." The beautiful, simple melody and its long history in the black gospel and jazz traditions make it an obvious favorite by someone like me. I especially like Sister Rosetta Tharpe's bluesy rendition, recorded in 1941.

Grant Green recorded a jazz version of the tune for an album of spirituals, Feelin' the Spirit. Featuring Green on guitar and Herbie Hancock, as well as drummer Billy Higgins, their instrumental version of one of gospel's greatest tunes is success. Hancock does not solo as much as Green, but the clean guitar sound works well with the song's simple melody. It's always a pleasure to hear jazz musicians play spirituals or gospel music, especially when some of the best jazz songs are really gospel numbers.

Mahalia Jackson sings the song very well in this video. "Daily walking close to Thee, oh, let it be, dear Lord, let it be."

Here's a good gospel version by the Five Blind Boys of Alabama

Here's a scene from a show I should be watching, Treme, that shows a New Orleans jazz funeral with the melody of "Just a Closer Walk With Thee"

Anti-Black Racism in post-Gaddafi Libya

http://www.theroot.com/views/your-take-tortuous-racism-alive-post-qaddafi-libya

A liberal muslim homosexual ACLU lawyer professor and abortion doctor

I first heard about this last week, but only read the actual story online last night at a friend's house. Everything about it is funny, and its an excellent parody of conservatives in this country. Smirking "Jewishly" is one of the highlights.

http://toosiblog.tumblr.com/post/12856396341/a-liberal-muslim-homosexual-aclu-lawyer-professor

Review of Mary Lou Williams Event

"The Recordings of Mary Lou Williams: A 50-Year Retrospective"

Father Peter O'Brien's presentation was very entertaining, though I came 20 minutes late. 

It appears to have started with a short documentary that provided a general overview of her life. 

Then the rest of the presentation  consisted of various pictures and music recordings throughout her career, beginning with Andy Kirk's band and 1929 to the early 1930s recordings. I really enjoyed the earlier swing and Kansas City-style sides. I also loved her rendition of "Tea for Two" and some of her later arrangements for Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, especially "Trumpet Madness" and "In the Land of Oo Bla Dee." Due to Father O'Brien's often talking a little too much, he had to rush the rest of the presentation and skip about 4 songs in order to play parts of her Zodiac Suite and her Jazz Mass, which included a jazzy version of Gloria that had the crowd rocking. Unfortunately, the video was shown on a rather small projector in the church but it was worth just to hear a man who worked with Mary LouWilliams so closely reflect on her career and jazz history.

However, one must wish the event had started earlier so that Father O'Brien would have had more time to share stories, reminisce, recollect, and show the rest of the video parts that were skipped. However, the pictures were fascinating and contained a lot of personal information about her life, such as her love for shoes, nice blouses, important people in her life, and the influence of Catholicism on her music. The bluesy elements of her Kansas-style were still present in parts of her Zodiac Suite, which was rich in heavy bass lines.

Saturday Night Concert at The Overture Review

Well, the concert was fun but I didn't enjoy the vocalist and the poet. They also started late. Instead of letting the band perform at 7:30, Father O'Brien and a few other speakers had to talk for 30 minutes. The first half of the set was just songs from Mary Lou Williams' Zodiac Suite. I hadn't heard most of it before, so it was new and interesting. 10 of the songs were written for a trio and the final two pieces were solo piano songs. However, it bothered me that Gerri Allen and the bassist Davis had sheet music for all of the first set and parts of the second set. Don't you think jazz musicians should have all the music memorized? I also thought the drummer Kossa Overall was great. He may not be the best drummer in the world, but he is young, has an afro, and played a great solo in the second set that had me groovin' and swingin'. The poet, Fabu, on the other hand, was terrible. She was out of place, her poetry was unnecessary, and trite. She didn't have anything new to say about Mary Lou's life and what she did say was superficial. She endeavored to imbue her poetry with that stereotypical pretentious artsy atmosphere which is just unbearable. Carmen Lundy, the vocalist, has an interesting voice but I would not go out of my way to listen to her recordings. She only sang 2 or 3 songs, and then left the stage. It was obvious that they had practiced together though, because during those 2-3 songs, the combo were synchronized. As for the bassist, his solos were interesting and just lovely to hear. 

The Kingdom of This World

"For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of his misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of This World."

Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World, translated into English by Harriet de Onis, is an interesting literary interpretation of the Haitian Revolution. Focusing on an old, ex-slave, Ti Noel, Carpentier uses historical figures and plays with the dates to show how the worldview of black slaves shaped the Haitian Revolution. Indeed, Carpentier influenced the 'magic realism' of later Latin American writes with his theory of lo real maravilloso, or marvelous realism, which emphasized the natural, extant systems of thought found within Latin America and the Caribbean rather than artificial, contrived notions of the supernatural one finds in surrealist artists and writers from Europe. Thus, Macandal, the one-armed slave believed by French whites to have died, burned to death, escapes by transforming into an insect and flying away according to the black slaves.

The opposing perspectives on the death of Macandal, however, are not diametrically opposed, since Vodou incorporates Christian/Catholic influences of Spanish and French colonial structures in the Caribbean. In addition to Macandal transforming into animals during and after his widespread poisoning of white planters in the Plaine du Nord, but Ti Noel himself also gains the ability to transform into animals. Other supernatural phenomena also occur, such as black slave rebels becoming impervious to bullets in while battling white troops. Moreover, the 'marvelous' reality these ex-slaves experience includes a world in which the lwa of Africa are omnipresent and necessary for the liberation of slaves. Indeed, it is through Vodou that liberation is achieved in the text, since Boukman leading the Bois Caiman ceremony was a Vodou ritual that included invoking the lwa. Despite the huge ethnic differences between Mandingos, Congos, and others, Vodou unites them in opposition to the material conditions of slavery because of it's syncretistic nature that incorporates aspects of each ethnic group and creolized black person's 'marvelous reality.'

On another level, the novel depicts the Haitian Revolution as similar to Animal Farm. After the success of overthrowing French colonialism and slavery, the people of northern Haiti continue to suffer under the black monarchy of Henri Christophe, whose Europhile regime exploits the ex-slaves through another system of forced labor. Until Christophe is then overthrown, and mulattoes from the South take power and endeavor to establish another state of slavery-like conditions, black ex-slaves continue reactionary rather than revolutionary changes. In each case, the French, Christophe's black monarchy, and the mulattoes, the black peasants respond with reactionary. For Carpentier, each individual must recognize the importance of striving for one's best in The Kingdom of This World, or the material world in which we live, rather than putting faith entirely in the gods of Africa for sustenance. Without dismissing the importance of Vodou and the supernatural worldview of Haitian blacks, the people must take control of their own destiny and transcend the exploitative conditions under which blacks are exposed due to French slavery, or black and mulatto attempts to restore plantation agriculture. Once this is achieved, The Kingdom of This World can surpass the Kingdom of Heaven.

On a historical level, however, one must question the ahistorical assumptions and generalizations made by Carpentier. There is an assumption that all the current lwa of Haiti (20th century, I suppose) were present in 18th century Saint Domingue. Furthermore, Carpentier's description of violence in Saint Domingue during the Revolution emphasizes black rape of white women like white narratives from the period. This implies that black men were/are rapists and extra-violent, rather than rational actors in the historical process of the Revolution. One must also mention that historically, despite their neglect and continued repression by various Haitian states, the Haitian peasant did succeed in largely unseating the plantation system of labor.  Overall, this novel is somewhat interesting since the white Cuban author writes about a black revolution. However, the novel's incomplete coverage of the Revolution, historical anachronisms, and weak plot do weaken its overall narrative structure. The concept of 'marvelous realism' and its influence on the magic realism of later Latin American writers is also highly significant for urging the adoption of local folklore and beliefs to construct an authentic perspective from those the writer wishes to represent. Rather than mimicking European styles and literary forms, writers from non-Western regions have gained a powerful tool for representing their own regions. 

Black Christ of Central Africa: Dona Beatriz

Dona Beatriz, or Beatriz Kimpa Vita, a noblewoman believing herself to be under possession by Saint Anthony, the most popular Roman Catholic saint in partially Christianized Kingdom of Kongo, the most powerful centralized state in 15th-17th centuries West Central Africa, is the black Christ of Central Africa. The Kongo kingdom used Christianity as a religion of the elite since the manikongo, Nzinga, converted to Catholicism after establishing diplomatic relations with Portugal. Some suggest that the Kingdom of Kongo's ruling family were initially interested in Christianity as part of a new way of justifying and legitimizing their authority over the vast domains in the 15-16th centuries. Regardless of their motives for converting to Christianity, the Kongo kingdom became the first "Sub-Saharan" Christian state in Africa, excluding Christian Ethiopia and the christian states of medieval Nubia. Interestingly, the Catholic Church, due to the interest of the royal family and elites, helped establish churches, a Jesuit university, a library, schools, and a mingling of Portuguese Catholic and Kongolese cultures. Out of this centuries-long process that included the growth of the slave trade, increasing dependence on the part of the Kongo king for Portuguese prestige goods that the Portguese would only trade for human captives, and civil wars that led to many Kongolese being sold into slavery across the Atlantic, Beatriz Kimpa Vita emerged in the 17th century. In addition to claiming to be possessed by Saint Anthony, she also argued for syncretization of the Catholic Church in Kongo by claiming Jesus Christ was a black man (he was regardless of what white folks have to say!), changing prayers, not using the cross, and fusing local, Kongolese religious traditions with Roman Catholicism. Living at a time when various contenders to the throne caused a long civil war as well as increasing frequency of war and conflicts due to the devastating slave trade, it's likely Dona Beatriz saw message of Christianity as a way to end conflicts and bring people together. However, since her theology was Kongolese, African Christianity not based on white European missionaries sent by Rome, she was accused of heresy and executed due to pressure placed on the Kongolese king in 1706. Her messianic message of the coming of Saint Anthony through her to restore the Kongo kingdom to stability, however, was widely received and accepted by peasants and some elites, including the wife of the king who had her executed! Indeed, even after her death, her movement may have influenced Kongolese Christian crucifixes of the 18th century, which displayed an African Christ with African features and Kongolese clothhing designs. In fact, her followers would stage a revolt against the Kongolese king after her death, which unfortunately failed. The weakened state, divided by civil war, willingly sacrificed the only messiah figure in the kingdom for greedy, Portuguese Catholics who resisted her theology.

The life of this fascinating woman is important in African Christianity, and as part of a long trend within African-descended communities threatened by or living under slavery to radically interpret Christianity as something entirely within their own worldview. Of course Dona Beatriz was not entirely opposed to Capuchin monks or Christians from Europe, but she rejected their attempts (Portugal and the Vatican) to limit and define how Kongolese Christians express their Christian beliefs. In this case, syncretic Christianity was natural, and believing that Saint Anthony could possess her demonstrates the persistence of non-Christian religious thought, which is actually reminiscent of the possession of humans by the lwa of Haitian Vodou or other syncretic Afro-Christian religions in Brazil and Cuba. Like Vodou, Santeria, Candomble, or macumba, the Kongolese emphasis on Saint Anthony or other saints besides solely Christ or the Trinity demonstrates a commonality between these various Afro-Creole religions. The rise of her Christian movement in a time of political upheaval, civil war, slave raiding, and Portuguese religious and economic intervention also reminds one of the messianic, Afrocentric religious groups that developed in 20th century Black America or even Nat Turner's Virgina revolt in 1831. Turner believed in a messianic vision in which the slave revolt would triumph, just as the Nation of Islam's founder, Fard Muhammad, claimed to be a prophet in 20th century black America. Or the Moorish Science Temple, which proclaimed blacks to be "Moors" and preached a radical, unorthodox version of Islam like the Nation of Islam did in the second half of the 20th century. The life of this astounding woman also illustrates another factor often neglected in studies on the creolization of enslaved blacks and the formation of new identities in the Americas: many enslaved Africans were exposed to Christianity before boarding any slave ship, and some were already 'Creole". 

Here's a good interview with John Thornton, a specialist on the Kongo kingdom and its relation to the broader Atlantic world. He discusses Dona Beatriz, the historical context for the rise of her movement, and Kongolese Christianity. 

http://www.executedtoday.com/2009/07/02/1706-dona-beatriz-kimpa-vita-kongo/

Interesting article on influence of Christianity in Kongo art

http://www.jdwelch.net/writing/kongo.html

Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal at UW-Madison

Earlier tonight, I had the pleasure of seeing Professor Mark Anthony Neal, writer of one of my favorite black progressive blogs, speak about hip-hop, wealth, and politics. His blog, newblackman.blogspot.com is a great site for its fascinating analysis, news updates, and links to interesting documentaries, newscasts, interviews, history, and popular culture. Moreover, as a public intellectual, scholars such as Neal and Michael Eric Dyson are an inspiration for my own blogging. Of course, I have failed to reach the same number of people they have through their use of social media, but seeing Neal was a huge burst of inspiration. Furthermore, his speaking style is very informal, relaxed, humorous, and natural, unlike my dry, pedantic attempts at lecturing. By focusing on hip-ho, and mainstream hip-hop specifically, it's also likely much easier for Neal to reach out to a much broader proportion of the population than my attempts, which tend to focus on literature of the Caribbean and African-America, too often expressed via long, sometimes too formal essays burdened with excessive verbiage.

Anywho, the two things Neal said that struck me the most are the enormous gaps in wealth that separate blacks and whites in this country, despite claims of a post-racial landscape. Indeed, I already knew of the enormous wealth gap, but he used statistics to illustrate it for the audience. As one knows, the mortage crisis played a large role in the economic collapse, but most mainstream news sources overlook how the economic disaster has hit blacks disproportionately more, reducing the black "middle-class" considerably into poverty. Another important observation Neal made was in response to a question about Immortal Technique and other 'revolutionary' rappers. These rappers are usually not the ones most inner-city blacks hear, so his focus on the subtle revolutionary messages contained in mainstream hip-hop rather than analyzing artists like Immortal Technique, whose fanbase is largely white, suburbanites. A friend of mine, who currently studies at a university in New York, once made a similar claim about Talib Kweli's listeners, surmising that the majority of his fans are probably whites, not the black ghetto denizens 'conscious' rappers attempt to reach. This is not to say that Neal said one must choose independent hip-hop or mainstream, but rather to suggest that each type of hip-hop is open to interpretation and analysis and should be heard through critical lens and accepted as valid expressions of the hip-hip ethos. His dissection of Jay-Z and Kanye's "Otis" exemplifies this approach, since the music video may appear to be another superficial, materialist rap song, but is actually about ingenuity, or turning an old, depreciated Maybach automobile into a work of art worth much more. Thus, the hidden layers beneath the veneer of materialism contain messages of artistic expression, black nationalist sentiment, and even allusions to Basquiat, whose art Jay-Z apparently admires.

After his speech, I had the opportunity to shake his hand and introduce myself, but foolishly did not share my blog or say much more than my own name and thank him for coming. It was well-used Monday evening. He also made references to Craig Werner, my professor for Soul Music and Civil Rights, and jazz bassist and UW faculty, Richard Davis, who played bass on famous jazz albums such as Black Fire and Out to Lunch. I'll keep reading his blog.

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

Lilas Desquiron's Reflections of Loko Miwa

“Alexandre’s messenger told me the makout were searching for a communist leader, an exile from Cuba, hidden by the fishermen. They swooped down on Les Irois like birds of prey and soon found the rebel. They recognized him right away. People say he was a famous writer, very tall, very black, but also with that distinguished air of a leader (113).” 

Lilas Desquiron’s Reflections of Loko Miwa, translated from the French by Robin Orr Bodkin, is a fascinating novel that reminds the reader of Depestre’s The Festival of the Greasy Pole. Like Festival, aspects of marvelous realism surface everywhere in the novel, especially regarding zombification, Vodou, and the supernatural phenomena associated with Vodou and magic. Though the novel is a simple love story of forbidden romance, the context of Papa Doc’s iron fist, Jeremie’s mulatto aristocracy, the futile attempt at armed insurrection against Papa Doc’s rule, and the world of Vodou allow the novel to transcend the narrow confines of the love story genre. Indeed, the novel also has some autobiographical aspects as well, since the protagonist, Violaine Delavigne, is a light-skinned child of Jeremie’s mulatto elite like the author Desquiron. Moreover, like Violaine, the author also identifies with her Afro-Haitian, Vodou roots more than her mostly French-inherited European traits. Thus, the novel offers a powerful critique of negritude or noirism as used by Papa Doc, which ostracized mulattoes and light-skinned folks for lacking dark pigmentation, though several of them do identify more strongly with their African/Haitian heritage, despite the distance separating them from it. 

The novel is also clever in that each chapter features a different character recalling their own memories in a chapter named after them to advance the plot of the relatively short novel. This also allows the two ritually made twins, Cocotte, a dark-skinned peasant girl, and Violaine, the beautiful, golden-hued mulatto to become marasa, or sisters. Despite their vastly different class and racial status in Jeremie’s nearly apartheid state of relations, Violaine’s honey-colored mother insists on a Vodou ritual ceremony ‘twinning’ her daughter with Cocotte. The two do become sisters, two halves of the same body metaphorically, and their conclusion has an emotional, successful ending of reunion. Unlike Cocotte and Violaine, Violaine’s black lover, Alexandre, doubts the power of the lwa and ends up languishing in a Port-au-Prince prison for political prisoners due to his aid of Jacques-Stephen Alexis and the other small band of rebels coming from Cuba. In fact, the very tall, very black man referenced in the above quotation from the text is a thinly-veiled reference to Jacques Stephen Alexis, a Haitian Marxist and novelist, best known for Compere General Soleil, a novel featuring lower-class, Haitian peasants and urban proletariat, also advocates the ‘marvelous realism’ one finds in Reflections of Loko Miwa and The Festival of the Greasy Pole. Like Festival, a zonbi is brought back to life, which includes sexual activity to truly become alive again, and the lwa are omnipresent in the lives of the people. 

Moreover, this novel’s utilization of Vodou demonstrates, as Marie Vieux-Chauvet does in her Amour, that lighter-skinned Haitians are not above using and practicing the Vodou of their distant African ancestors. Violaine’s mothers, and her aunts, resort to consulting a oungan or gangan in order to kill Violaine, then turn her into a zonbi. In Chauvet’s Amour, Claire’s father, light-skinned enough to pass for a white man, continues to pay tribute to the lwa of his black grandmother in order to keep his lands productive and maintain his family’s fortune. In Reflections, Violaine and her mother continue to practice dedication to the lwa of their black ancestors, such as Chemin, Violaine’s black-skinned great-grandmother, but mulattoes like Madame Delavigne never practice Vodou publicly, socialize with darker blacks, and worship publicly only in Catholic Churches, wearing their finest clothes.  Violaine, on the other hand, worships the lwa openly, receives an intiation from Man Chavannes, a black manbo, and incorporates Vodou, African-derived dances and walking into her sexually charged gait. She transcends the class barriers that separate wealthy mulattoes from the poor black majority, which means she publicly embraces her black lover outside of the Catholic Church, something her great-grandfather could never do with his beloved black parter, Chemin. This is particular relevant to Desquiron’s critique of biological essentialism in negritude that would preclude people like her or Violaine, since Violaine is not like those who are:‎

”the mulatto merchants of Jeremie are all descendants of pirates. They are all vendors of pakoti and exporters of coffee, cocoa, or campeachy wood, and they are all as proud as can be of their pale skin. They protect it from the fierce Caribbean sun with an almost maniacal care, as if they could hide the original sin of their negritude beneath a pale epidermis."

She embraces her distant black ancestors, regardless of her parents’ refusal to acknowledge their black ancestors, which unites them with the rest of Haiti’s population. In addition, Desquiron’s critique of negritude applies to her critique of Duvalier’s noiriste regime, which targeted mulatto elites as un-Haitian because of their light complexion and distance from the black majority. This culminated in a massacre of some of Jeremie’s mulatto aristocracy in the 1960s, which is alluded to in the novel with the failed attempted rebel band led by Jacques Stephen Alexis. Desquiron’s novel also demonstrates how everyone suffers due to the noirist policy. The farmers who provided shelter and hide the rebels are massacred, and the protest through the streets of Port-au-Prince that preceded the doomed rebels, was brutally quelled by the makout. 

            To most lucid minds, the obvious problems of Duvalier’s rule do not require literature to see how the dictator manipulated race, religion, class, and fear to control a nation. However, literature does provide a human face(s) to see how it affected human lives. This feminist novel, demonstrates the power of Vodou in the lives of the people, its potential to be used and abused by individuals, and the fundamental unity of Haitians through the shared experience of slavery and liberation by their own hands. The following quote from Violaine’s reflection on her family’s dedication to the lwa despite their Catholic, upper-class background is interesting:

My father willingly carried out all of this because he understood that the rigorous observance of the “rules” was the essential condition for maintaining prosperity in our family. In order to preserve his status, fortune, and even his health, he had to fulfill his responsibilities with respect to the lwa rasin. How many prosperous, proud families had fallen on the worst of times because they had forgot this, because they had actually believed they had become white families?

Throughout the novel, she compares the denied African blood of Violaine’s family to an original sin, a mark of Cain that they will never be able to eradicate despite all their attempts to do so. Indeed, the fact that they continue to practice Vodou like the black peasants and lower-classes they despise illustrates how similar they are to those they separate themselves from. Ironically, perhaps the basis of unity between these two peoples lies in their mutual religious practices, which posits a similarly marvelous realism seen through the lens of Vodou. Furthermore, as a feminist novel, its conclusion of women finding solace in the company of each other, supporting each other with or without any man, becomes clear with the sisters, Cocotte and Violaine, who join the food vendor women of Ben Antre in Port-au-Prince. Indeed, the vendors say, “No! Cocotte, don’t say that! No, you two are not all alone. We’re all here for you, and don’t forget it!"

Mikhail Gorbachev's Introduction to a Bloom County Comic Strip Compilation

"When presented with the material that was to be the contents of this cartoon book, I was at once surprised and amused. The thin cat Bill and his companion Opus the Artic bird were not the usual heroes of American literature! But upon reconsideration, I am not so surprised. 

I have read several American books, including Huckleberry Finn by the southern writer Mark Twain. The themes of the lone individual in his struggle with the imposed injustices of his oppressors has been dealt with extensively in such works. Indeed, it is in the relationship between Opus and Bill that I also see a parallel situation with Huckleberry Finn and the escaping Negro slave-laborer Jim. Both Bill and the slave Jim have experienced the social degredation of a system unresponsive to the particular needs of its citizens. Both characters are forced to turn to rely on others.--saviors as such--to deliver them from the consequences of an unjust situation. When Opus the Bird explains to his friend Bill that he is probably being exploited by his new romantic companion UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, we can readily see a similar struggle when Huckleberry saved the slave Jim from drowning in the great Mississippi river.

The dialectics of Bloom County are such: the more oppressive and dangerous is the situation, the more we need the warm embrace of others. I salute and warmly recommend this cartoon book to all Americans, especially those "drowning in the great Mississippi river," as it were.

It is here where I must be forthright and admit that the publishers of this volume have successfully appealed to my schoolboy vanity by requesting a modest "doodle" cartoon. As the reader will plainly detect, the Pentagon will be sad to see that I will not be leaving my governmental duties for a new career in the art profession anytime soon!" 

KRS-One's Sound of Da Police

The excellent hip-hop song, "Sound of Da Police" is a song I first heard in the British film, Attack the Block. A film about inner-city Londoners fighting an alien invasion, it's much better than you would expect. This song, at attack on the police, comparing them to overseers on plantations, is more relevant now than ever after the murder of an unarmed, 18 year old black man in the Bronx. Ramarley Graham was pursued by cops into his own home and shot to death for no real reason except the fact that he was black and had some marijuana on him. Despite attempts to valorize the police, proclaiming they uphold justice and protect citizens, they have always been about maintaining the status quo. Any time a social movement emerges to create positive change, the police are on the opposing side, using firehoses, riot gear, guns, and brute force to quell it. So, in honor of all the black men, women, and people of all races and backgrounds who have borne the brunt of police brutality, let's all listen to "Sound of da Police." As Ramarley Graham learned so well, it's the sound of da beast. And anytime some fool tries to defend the police, blast this jam and laugh in their faces.
As I've learned over the past several years as a black man living in the plantation-like conditions we people of African descent still face, fuck the police.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oENrgffA5VI

Rene Depestre's The Festival of the Greasy Pole

You know, watching your battle on the pole, some words of a writer that I love have acquired their full sense for me: ‘Experience is the staff of the blind and what counts, since you’re asking me, is rebellion, and the knowledge that man is the baker of life.’ It’s not a mythical hero who entered me yesterday evening, but the baker Henri Postel.”

            Depestre’s Le mat de cocagne, translated into English by Carrol F. Coates, is a scathing critique of Papa Doc’s noirist regime. Though Depestre begins the novel with a disclaimer, stating that this story is entirely fiction, the characters, setting, and language (Creole expressions and words appear) make it clearly Haiti. Depestre names the capital Port-au-Roi, and turns Fort Dimanche into Fort Samedi, but it is clearly Papa Doc’s Haiti and infamous tonton macoutes who rule. The novel is also quite ingenious and reminiscent of postmodern African-American literature, such as Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed. The novel lacks differentiated chapters or sections, save an epilogue which reveals the narrator to be a Haitian writing in Paris about the novel’s protagonist, Henri Postel, an ex-Senator of mulatto extraction whose family was slayed by Zoocrates Zachary (Francois Duvalier, or Papa Doc). Instead of killing him outright, Zoocrates has Postel turned into a zombie forced to sell groceries in the city of Port-au-Roi. The novel then follows his gradual transformation from zombified slave to the Zachary regime to a powerful, regenerated man who will ascend the greasy pole. The pole, an obvious phallic symbol, also symbolizes Zoocrates Zachary himself, alongside his regime. Our protagonist, a middle-aged, overweight mulatto, in addition to seven other men, compete to climb the greasy pole in the Square of Heroes, which is an enormous spectacle for the masses as well as an opportunity for Zachary’s propagandists to praise the mercy of the government for allowing the disgraced, former senator who had initially opposed Zachary’s electoral coup in 1957 (the real Papa Doc also took power in 1957) to enter the competition.

            A key part of Henri entering the competition instead of fleeing aboard a Canadian cargo ship was to put his destiny in his own hands, which would restore his humanity instead of slaving as a zombie or running away to exile. In addition, his ascent to the summit of the greasy, disgusting pole would serve as an example to waken the electrified, zombified souls of the people, who have accepted Zoocrates Zachary’s brutal, dehumanizing regime. In fact, he wins support from a coalition of young people prepared to use violence to unseat Zachary’s regime founded on a principle of violence, led by Jean-Jacques Brissaracq. If the name Jean-Jacques did not immediately evoke the memory of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, founder of Haitian independence and a believer in violence himself, then the reader is unfamiliar with Haitian history. But the two men collaborate due to a shared goal of liberating the consciousness of the masses, slaves to the

National Office for the Electrification of Souls controlled by the Electrifier of Souls himself, Zoocrates Zachary. Thus, the ideological message of this novel is not the socialist background of Depestre, but empowering the individual. Since a dictator’s power relies on fear, docility and violence to perpetuate its brutal dehumanizing existence, enough individuals must stand up. Henri Postel does just that, standing up, recovering his humanity, and in the process, restoring his manliness both metaphorically and sexually. Moreover, the novel argues against blind faith in the loas of Haitian Vodou, or any sense of fatalism that encourages subservience. Thus, Depestre’s socialist background clearly influenced the novel in that regard, since socialists emphasize the role and potential power of individuals to shape their destiny.

Zoocrates, formerly a doctor, like the historical Papa Doc, relies on violence, exploitation of Haitian Vodou, sorcery, and economic support from the US to fund his reign of terror. His majestic greasy pole symbolizes his Papa Phallus fucking the Sky vagina of freedom (63), which explains why Postel must reach the summit. On another note, the fascinating part of Deprestre’s novel is the presence of what has been referred to as ‘marvelous realism’ or magical realism. Beginning with Cuban author Alejo Carpentier’s Kingdom of this World, marvelous realism sees the world from the perspective of the Afro-Caribbean peoples themselves, meaning their religious, mythological, and cultural lens determine what occurs. Like Jacques-Stephen Alexis, another Haitian writer who came of age and participated in the 1946 student strike that brought down the regime of Elie Lescot, both writers have used this concept of marvelous realism to create a world rooted in the worldview of Haitians. Vodou, with its plethora of loas, the fear of bakas and zobops who abuse their power for evil, and the importance and omnipresence of the loas means that supernatural events are widely believed by the characters of the novel. Although Henri Postel and his friend, Horace Vermont, educated Haitians, doubt the power of Vodou, their own lives are fundamentally changed by it. Indeed, after seeing his family eradicated by Zachary’s soldiers, he is turned into a zombie aware of his condition, which is widely believed by the people of Port-au-Roi as well as Postel’s decaying body. Though initially disdainful and resistant to the help of the loa Papa Loko, who Sor Cisa says is necessary to ensure that Postel’s body can resist the death curse of Baron Samedi on the pole, after she calls Papa Loko through the cheval in the neighborhood, and she becomes mounted by Erzulie, the loa of love, Postel’s body changes entirely. He becomes physically capable of mounting the greasy pole after he can achieve erection, which requires the help of Sor Cisa’s beautiful cousin, Elisa Valery. If he was not a zombie prior to this healing, regenerative vodou ceremony, why could he not get an erection? In addition to Postel and Vermont’s own experiences observing the power of vodou and bokors who use sorcery for evil purposes, Zoocrates Zachary’s regime lives on vodou. Gloomy-Simon-Seven-Days, a zobop in a secret society of sorcerers, serves as Zachary’s witch for inserting Zachary into the pole, which culminates in the insertion of a hernia in the pole (132). Every character accepts these supernatural occurences, calling of the loas who possess their human ‘mounts,’ and the general craziness of life in a nation where the supernatural becomes the norm in the daily experiences of the people.

The pole, constructed from a tree, symbolizes living principle that endlessly regenerates the cosmos, which is a area of residence for the loas. Zachary, however, uses sorcery to defile a natural bridge between the spirits and the natural world, and endeavors to use racial divisions to further his own power. His propagandist journalist turns the Greasy Pole, “for anyone knowing the history of the island, will symbolize from today onward the Force of the Black Man, of the Maroon with his red eyes, black and shining like ebony, polished by three centuries of slavery…” (46). The Maroon, an icon of Black liberation and humanity, is also embued with Vodou symbolism, since the red eyes suggest someone possessed by the loas. Furthermore, the widespread belief among black slaves in the 18^th century concerning the French execution of Macandal, that he turned into an insect rather than be killed by whites, illustrates the centrality of Vodou in the minds of Haitians. Indeed, to Haitians, Papa Loko was the protector of Dessalines during the Haitian Revolution (52). Seeking the help of Papa Loko, the escort chief for Atibon-Legba, loa of the crossroads, is also highly significant because the tree that makes up the pole is a vertical road that connects the human world and spirits (51). Fortunately, both Postel and Vermont realize that “We’ll never make citizens of our peasants with materialist discourse,” affirming the centrality of Vodou in the lives of the people they seek to liberate (51). Thus, the best way to achieve social change, or awaken the consciousness of the black masses to their extreme exploitation and inculcate resistance is through the use of Vodou in positive ways that empower humans. Therefore, Papa Loko and Sor Cisa healing and restoring Postel to humanity allow him, as an individual, to alter his own fate. Thus, one need not choose one or the other in a world of Manichean dualism, but both the spiritual, religious traditions of the Haitian people and recognition of the power of humanity to alter its own fate can be fused, just as the syncretistic religion of Vodou demonstrates.
            Unfortunately for the fictionalized world of Haiti depicted here, Depestre’s protagonist does not succeed in toppling the regime. His life, death, and resurrection changes the consciousness of the people, however, revealing the weaknesses and division within Zachary’s own government. His daughter, Angel, a whore, and his right-hand man, Clovis Barbotog, fight for control, culminating in the deaths of a few prominent officials in the administration. At the novel’s conclusion, the struggle to for mental and physical emancipation continues, but the resistance is stronger, and its spirit lives on through Elisa Valery, the lover of Postel who kissed his feet before his death at the summit of the Greasy Pole (130), which means Postel’s life and death turned him into a mobilizing Christ-figure. The eeriness of the novel comes into play with how well it parallels the actual recent history of Haiti, which faced the longer reign of Baby Doc after Papa Doc’s death in 1971. Baby Doc, a wealthy fool, could not retain power and fear like his father, and was eventually forced to flee to France after the enraged waves of humanity of Haiti rose in revolt. However, even after expelling dictators who wished to keep them trapped like zombies, the struggle for emancipation never ends with the removal of one leader, but remains a perpetual battle to create conditions propitious for human rights. Men and women, like Postel and his lover, Elisa, who remains a symbol of resistance, remain necessary to incite rebellion and shock the people into motion, just as Jean-Bertrand Aristide did for millions of Haitians through Lavalas. Of course, that did not work out so well either, and the battle continues to this day in the streets of Port-au-Prince.

Depestre, an astute writer, succeeds in encapsulating the world of Haitians depicted in this novel, which succeeds in paralleling Haitian history, emphasizing the supernatural and the natural as two sides of the same reality through the novel’s characters, and how movements to injustice must emanate from the local conditions of the oppressed peoples themselves. As an exile that lived in several different countries, the novel is also a powerful tribute to those Haitians who remained in Haiti to resist Duvalier and the excesses of the successive corrupt government and military rule. Depestre also highlights the contradictions and problems of negritude and its capability to be manipulated for political agendas, since Zoocrates Zachary, like Papa Doc, began his career as a ‘black power’ intellectual writing in Les Griot, which resulted in extreme violence against mulattoes, whose opposition to his regime could easily be deemed illegitimate due to the long history of mulatto misrule and exclusion of blacks from the political system. Thus, the character of the mulatto, educated, Haitian willing to sacrifice himself for others is an allegory for racial reconciliation, emphasizing all the peoples of Haiti as one, despite the legacies of slavery and racism. In fact, the extreme negritude of Duvalier, or Zachary in the novel, works against the interests of the black majority, in addition to overlooking the obvious syncretism of Haitian vodou, which symbolizes the syncretism of Haitian society overall. The Syrians, mulattos, black peasants, middle-class urban blacks, and urban proletariat have a mutual interest in survival, since neither one is totally impervious to the extremes of the predatory Haitian state. So this novel could also be read as a critique of negritude philosophy and its vagaries, which overlook the creoleness of the Caribbean.

Remembering Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco

I need to reread this excellent novel. I plan on reading 2 more Haitian novels and then rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I shall return to this novel by a highly gifted wordsmith. I completely overlooked the gender dynamics of the novel relating to the City (Fort-de-France) as masculine and the shantytown of Texaco as feminine. That gendered binary plays a large role in the novel and the character of Marie-Sophie Laborieux, a femme matador protagonist and founder of the novel. Of course, the 'feminine' shantytown also possesses the positive characteristics of the Creole nature of Martinique, so Chamoiseau elevates the feminine over the masculine, white and elite City. Moreover, the character of Marie-Sophie is based on Chamoiseau's informant for the novel, Madame Sico, founder of Texaco in real life, and his own mother, two women he characterizes as strong, Caribbean women who are resilient and decisive in their own lives. It is also important to remember that Chamoiseau himself focuses on a 'rural' culture in an urban space in the novel, since Creole is fundamentally rural due to its origins in the slave plantations of previous centuries. Indeed, all city cultures find themselves irrevocably derived and maintaining the original rural cultures that make up the story.
On a final note, it is also significant that a woman would be the storyteller in this narrative, since the storyteller is more often than not male. Chamoiseau, however, elucidates in an interview with literary critic Bonnie Thomas in her Breadfruit or Chestnut?: Gender Construction in the French Caribbean Novel how the Caribbean family has a tendency towards being matrifocal with a peripheral, mobile father who historically was laboring in the field or sold off in slavery days. Thus, Caribbean mothers and women have often led families and their own lives independently of a present male figure.

General Sun, My Brother

And yet, General Sun is a great man—he has always been the friend of poor black men, the guiding spirit who shows only one yellow eye to the living, but he fights for us at each turn and always shows us the way. Just as he always conquers night and wrests a season that he controls each year, workers can change the times and find a season to live without misery.

Compère Général Soleil (1955), by Jacques-Stephen Alexis, a Haitian novelist, Communist, and victim of Duvalier’s regime, is widely considered required reading in Haitian and Francophone Caribbean literature. Alexis, a man of the elite committed to democratization and socialism, lost his life when he landed with a small group of revolutionaries from Cuba in a poor attempt to overthrow Papa Doc in 1961. Though a descendant of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the father of Haitian independence, and other black Haitians of social prominence, Alexis clearly identified with the poor, peasant majority of Haiti exploited by white American imperialism, Haitian dictatorships, Trujillo’s anti-haitianismo, natural disasters such the flooding of the Artibonite, and extreme social inequality. Translated into English as General Sun, My Brother, Alexis, as the sympathetic third person narrator, ‘humanizes’ nature by using the Sun as a metaphor for the struggle of the poor. Indeed, the narrator’s voice in this narrative is fascinating, for the excessively described natural wonders and animal life of Haiti abound in the novel’s pages, as well as the narrator’s tangents on life, parenthood, and the world of the 1930s, when this novel is set.

However, I cannot help but feel a little disappointed with the novel since I was expecting a much longer portion of the text to focus on the 1937 genocide of Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans by Trujillo’s soldiers, targeting Haitians by asking dark-skinned Dominicans to pronounce the word perejil, parsley, knowing that Haitians often have trouble with the Spanish r. Edwidge Danticat wrote her Farming of the Bones as a tribute and reinterpretation of the genocide through the lens of a female character rather than Alexis’s Hilarion, but I was surprised to find that most of the novel is set in Port-au-Prince and Leogane rather than the Dominican Republic and the massacre. Nevertheless, Alexis’s novel succeeds in demonstrating how the poor majority of Haiti participated in a much larger world of ideas, nation-states, and struggles than one would think, especially the Communist movement in Haiti. Indeed, the character of Pierre Roumel, founder of the Haitian Communist Party, is based on Jacques Roumain, Haitian Communist, writer and political prisoner of the Haitian state forced into exile. Pierre Roumel opens up Hilarion’s eyes, helping him see himself in a larger historical struggle in the forces of capitalism, imperialism, and workers’ organization.

Unfortunately, much like Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood and Roumain’s Masters of the Dew, the explicit socialist undertones do limit the story since everything can be reduced to pro-Communist propaganda rather than fully developed characters. In this case, however, Alexis’s narrator and the life of Hilarion help avoid the limits of socialist parable tales because of the universal themes of race, gender relations, and religion, in addition to the critiques of the disconnected lives of Marxists themselves, who are often unable to ever truly connect with the masses of workers. Hilarion, child of Haitian peasants, formerly a restavek due to his mother’s poverty, and previously ignorant and unaware of the larger struggles taking place around himself and the world, eventually applies the lessons he learns from Communists like Roumel and Jean-Michel to understand the power of collective worker actions. In fact, the lessons of the ‘Reds’ pays off when the Haitian sugarcane workers (including Hilarion and his cousin, Josaphat, who fled to the Dominican Republic after killing a Haitian policeman who was raping his sister) join a strike inspired by Communist activists and succeed in getting most of their demands met by the American management.

There also are several references that praise peasant and lower-class Haitian culture that reaffirm the humanity and dignity of the black poor. Like Jean-Price Mars, a Haitian intellectual founder of negritude, best known for Ainsi parla l'oncle, which praised Haitian folklore and traditions, perhaps going as far as romanticizing it. Throughout the novel, the narrator commends Haitians for their work ethic, their skills and experiences as musicians, the cuisine, and the beauty of the natural landscape (the sea, the mountains, the Artibonite river) as a tribute to Haiti, and the island of Hispaniola. Furthermore, the narrator inserts several Creole expressions, proverbs, and words that are not translated to present the world as seen through the eyes of Hilarion, his wife, Claire, and others. The narrator’s reliance on Creole phrases and the mix of French, Spanish and Creole in the text’s original French form reveals the multi-ethnic, pan-Caribbean dimensions of the Communist movement, too. Alexis’s mother, of Dominican Spanish descent, would have encouraged Alexis’s pan-Caribbean framework, as well as the fact that the viejos, or Haitians who worked in Cuba or the Dominican Republic during this period often returned to Haiti with tales of the outside world or brought more Haitians to neighboring islands. These transnational communities, as well as the spread of communist ideas led to creations conducive for international communism, labor movements from Cuba to the Dominican Republic, and negritude. Once one gets past the exterior differences between Haitians and Dominicans, such as Spanish versus Creole, Alexis’s narrator points out the numerous similarities that unite the two nations, despite Trujillo’s attempts to eradicate those unable to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley with the Spanish, rolled r. Haitians and Dominicans share a common culture rooted in cock fights, a common status as oppressed workers under the thrall of American imperialism, merengue (of Haitian origin, but popular in the Dominican Republic), a mixed Creole-Spanish language near the border, and mutual African ancestry. Moreover, the narrator goes out of his or her way to explain how it was Trujillo and his followers, not the Dominican people, who carried out the killings of Haitians. Dominican soldiers, with guns and machetes, were the ones who pursued, killed, and tortured Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans. Dominican people, such as the cowherd, or Concepcion, help Hilarion, Claire, and their baby escape from Macoris, fleeing toward the Haitian border. Some of the Dominican characters who help them flee also cannot escape feeling some sense of responsibility for the massacres, despite the risks of being caught helping them.

Overall, this novel is able to overcome its possible limits from the strong undercurrents of Communism. Hilarion’s transformation from petty thief of Port-au-Prince to a dedicated father, husband, and worker with class consciousness is only partly due to his education by Marxists, and partly due to the unique experiences of Haitians oppressed by American occupation, Vincent, the corrupt president, and the elite classes that profit from the hyperexploitation of the Haitian poor. In addition, Hilarion and the series of disasters he overcomes are partly due to economics and class, but also due to the natural world around him (the flooding of the Artibonite, which forces thousands of peasants to come to Port-au-Prince in search of food and work). Likewise, his informal marriage to Claire and becoming a father help Hilarion develop into a mature, rational human being with purpose in his life. Now that he is a father, a life of crime and meaningless leeching on a society of other poor will not provide for his child. Alexis also demonstrates the importance of recognizing the common threads that unite humanity, beyond class to include music, language, and religion in the case of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. General Sun, My Brother also delivers a scathing critique to social elites on both sides of the island, as well as the exploitation of the poor by religious officials and leaders, including a houngan who overcharges the Haitian peasants in Josaphat’s village near Leogane for a burial service. In the end, like the Sun, the people must take their lives and put it in their own hands to make the world around them a better place. Like the Sun that conquers night, individuals have the ability to improve their lot in life, and cannot meekly accept the established social order. Thus, compared to Masters of the Dew, Hilarion breathes more a real human being than Manuel, who seems to only be a spark for the collective, koumbite consciousness necessary to restore his village.