Mingus...Live!

Some lovely jazz from Charles Mingus, featuring the inimitable Eric Dolphy. 

Turn Again Tiger

Standing on the hill gave him a feeling of power. He hated the cane. Cane had been the destiny of his father, and his father's father. Cane had brought them all from the banks of the Ganges as indentured laborers to toil in the burning sun. And even when those days were over, most of them stayed shackled to the estates."

Samuel Selvon's Turn Again Tiger is an enjoyable work with great humor, continuing the tale of Tiger, a creolized Trinidadian of Indian descent. Tiger, comfortable in Barataria, agrees to help his father run a new sugarcane estate in the valley, in a small, forgotten corner of Trinidad called Five Rivers. Given false information on the job, Tiger agrees to help his father and moves to this new village, trying to figure out how to be a man along the way. 

According to Naipaul's review of the novel, Turn Again Tiger appears to be a sequel to an earlier work by Selvon, which probably explains his origins in the canefields, his relationship with Sookdeo, the man who taught him how to read, as well as Tiger's fraught relationship with the estate (and by extension, white people, the race all Trinidadians see as God). In his review of the novel, Naipaul seemingly characterizes the novel as a typical or formulaic "Race, Sex, and Caribbean" anti-colonial text, which has some veracity. 

While the central white character to the novel, Doreen, who inspires so much of Tiger's internal turmoil and frustration, is not given the complexity or depth of other characters in this novel (the entire village becomes a character, except the white overseer, Robinson, who, as a symbol of the plantation and colonialism does not mingle with the masses but controls from behind the scenes), one could ask why should the two white characters be centered in a narrative about a multiracial, poor community? Or, on another note of importance, why does this novel include powerful collective women's voices, but reaffirms patriarchal cultural norms and power relations in Five Rivers?

In another way, this novel could be compared in intriguing ways to Mr. Naipaul's Guerrillas or The Mimic Men, which all feature interracial relationships between West Indian men and white women. In Selvon's narrative, the white female body becomes, in a way strangely reminiscent of Jimmy Ahmed's sexual conquests or the fascinating character in Salih's illustrious novel, a way in which the colonized male subject reverts the established order. Naipaul, unlike Selvon, however, includes these white women characters' inner desires and political contradictions in the aforementioned novels. Strangely, much like Ralph Singh or Jimmy Ahmed, Tiger seems to share similar sexual frustrations related to the colonized West Indian, but Naipaul was more dismissive of this aspect of Selvon's novel.

Archie Shepp's Le Matin

Incredibly catchy free jazz for Sunday evening by Archie Shepp. The composition is entitled "Le Matin Des Noire." 

I Hear Thunder

'"Hello mister white man,' Birdie said.

'Say hello Mr Randolph,' Randolph said.

'Hello Mr Randolph white man,' Birdie said."

Samuel Selvon's I Hear Thunder is a spectacular (and short) novel about life in Trinidad in the 1960s. Told with a great sense of humor and third person narration, the island itself, Port of Spain, and Carnival nearly become characters. The protagonist, Adrian, a Trinidadian male of Indian descent, unhappy with the loose morals and apparent meaningless of party life, is treading a tightrope between the two extremes as his old schoolmate, Mark, returns to the island with a white wife. Class, race, color, sex, migration, and gender are just a few of the themes explored in this deceptively simple novel. The Carnival itself exemplifies this contradiction, and along the way Selvon's detailed depiction of the various races and classes of Trinidad enthrall the reader.

If Selvon and Naipaul had been able to collaborate on Trinidadian short fiction, I suspect it would have been amazing, with Selvon's deeper affection balancing the condescension of Naipaul. Both writers are products of the Indo-Caribbean community, with Selvon resembling Adrian in I Hear Thunder, and they share a similar sense of humor and depth for the island's social landscape and history. Alas, one can dream though?

Cojelo Ahi

Guitar merengue jam for the day. Antony Santos remains one of my favorite artists from the Dominican Republic.

The Enigma of Arrival

Naipaul on grounds of Wiltshire home, 1978 (Source)

"I had given myself a past, and a romance of the past. One of the loose ends in my mind had vanished; a little chasm filled. And though something like Haitian anarchy seemed to threaten my little island, and though physically I no longer belonged to the place, yet the romance by which I had attached it to the rest of the world continued to be possessed by me as much as the imaginative worlds of my other, fictional books."

Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival is an autobiographical tome on the cycle of life, migration, and change. Set in the English countryside, while the narrator, representing Naipaul, is renting a cottage, walking, and writing, the text comments on the seasons, the gradual changes or decline of the manor, life and social relations in England, and explorations of the narrator's journey, a process of returns or flights, both literal and metaphorical. 

The novel reminds one of The Enigma of the Return  by Dany Laferrière in that both feature a shared fixation on movement to and from the Caribbean. While Trinidad is only of many areas in which Naipaul returns to in his fiction, here his childhood and "second childhood" in his Wiltshire cottage leave room for thought on Naipaul's shifting identity, self-perception as an international or "metropolitan" writer, and the Trinidad which has become more imaginary than real for him. Just as his time in the countryside, appreciating the history and natural splendor of the area, eventually comes to an end, Naipaul's journey continues in interesting ways as we are introduced to the infirm landlord, the Phillipses, who manage, the gardener, and other characters in the book progress, age, die. 

There is no such thing as an immutable world, and the decay of the landlord's estate in England is mirrored by the shocking changes in Naipaul's Trinidad, where the old Indian villages of the countryside have disappeared while Caribbean immigrants, shantytowns, an oil boom, independence, and racial politics transform Naipaul. The enigma of arrival, indeed! Whether traveling to New York and England for the first time, ruminating on his experiences in other Caribbean locales, or describing his image of Africa and India, the mysteries of the world evolve, and the greatest of mysteries, humanity, changes with generations. Naipaul's return to Trinidad for his younger sister's cremation rituals, provides an excellent conclusion to this theme. 

One of the more intriguing aspects of this novel is the image of Trinidad and the Caribbean, a region in which Naipaul begins to understand its greater role in world history just as he loses it due to no longer being part of the changed Trinidad. When first leaving it in 1950 for Oxford, he describes in great detail seeing the island from the sky for the first time, seeing it as much more than a small colonial outpost where his half-education through abstraction was something to escape. He even feels some connection with an Afro-Trinidadian man on the plane, and an African-American en route to Europe on the ship from New York. His colonial roots, his uprooting from India and the Caribbean, connects him with the African-American on the ship who refuses to be placed in Naipaul's quarters to avoid being ghettoized or segregated based on race. One sees from incidents like these, a shared desire on Naipaul's part to escape being pigeonholed or segregated because of his race, in his desire to become a metropolitan writer. 

Yet, one also detects some regional kinship with the Trinidadian, with the travels in Belize, his stops in Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Barbados, and Anguilla. By connecting the history of Trinidad to the early European conquest of the region, the French fleeing the Haitian and French Revolutions to Trinidad in the 19th century. Here, one finds a troubling view of the Haitian Revolution as an example of black revolt or revolution rooted in anger and turning away from the world, not trying to improve it. He compares this complex, 19th century event with Black Power in Trinidad, two distinct historical events, yet sees it all as part of the general 'plantation colony' heritage of the Caribbean. Its an interesting perspective, but not exactly historically accurate, though one sees where Naipaul is going with that assertion. The Trinidad of his youth, the one he returns to by the novel's end, is no longer for him. Much like Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men or other characters in Naipaul's fiction, the narrator is uprooted from his Asiatic or Hindu origins as well as the Caribbean, while England is also a site of change or rootlessness in its own ways, as exemplified by the gradual decay of the manor.

There is much more to be said about this work, which I shall return to in future posts about the author. A stronger comparative work on its commonalities with "The Enigma of the Return" for instance, would be fascinating reading for how both authors approach their respective origins, or the Caribbean. Impressively, it manages to, while delving into great detail about the estates, the colors, shapes, seasonal variety, and inhabitants of the English countryside, connect history, colonialism, identity, travel, and blur the lines between fact and fiction. The description of the Hindu rituals, pundit cousin, and death of Sati are quite moving, too. 

Favorite Quotes

"That final trip to the pub served no cause except that of life; yet he made it appear an act of heroism; poetical." (48)

"These ideas of a world in decay, a world subject to constant change, and of the shortness of human life, made many things bearable." (23)

"I had thought that because of my insecure past--peasant India, colonial Trinidad, my own family circumstances, the colonial smallness that didn't consort with the grandeur of my ambition, my uprooting of myself for a writing career, my coming to England with so little, and the very little I still had to fall back on--I had thought that because of this I had been given an especially tender or raw sense of an unaccommodating world" (92).

"Yet I was also ashamed that, with all my aspirations, and all that I had put into this adventure, this was all that people saw in me---so far from the way I thought of myself, so far from what I wanted for myself. And it was shame, too, that made me keep my eyes closed while they were in the cabin" (126).

"Two hundred years on, another Haiti was preparing, I thought: a wish to destroy a world judged corrupt and too full of pain, to turn one's back on it, rather than to improve it" (161).

"The story had become more personal: my journey, the writer's journey, the writer defined by his writing discoveries, his ways of seeing, rather than by his personal adventures, writer and man separate at the beginning of the journey and coming together again in a second life just before the end" (344).

"Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there" (353).

A House for Mr. Biswas at Jaipur

Enjoy a provoking discussion of Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas at a book festival in Jaipur, India. Hanif Kureishi and Paul Theroux talk about Naipaul's epic masterpiece while Naipaul is sitting in the audience, which is a little strange, as Kureishi points out. I have also ranted about Naipaul's masterpiece on this blog. Like many of his Trinidad books, there is a rich sense of humor and perhaps even affection, if you delve deeper through the satire or condescension. 

In a Free State

"He will never in a hundred years understand how ordinary the world was for me, with nothing good in it, nothing to see except sugarcane and the pitch road, and how from small I know I had no life."

V.S. Naipaul's In a Free State won the Booker in 1971, and consists of 5 different stories, the longest being a novella. Bringing together the metropole (London, Washington) with recently decolonized countries (India, Egypt, Trinidad, Uganda), the prize-winning book explores the contours of freedom, in both a personal sense as an immigrant, a settler in Africa, and a traveler who sounds suspiciously like Naipaul himself in the prologue and epilogue, both centered on Egypt. All stories share movement as a theme, whether occurring through planes, automobiles, cruisers, trains, or ships in the Mediterranean, Egyptian desert, London, 

The most interesting of the stories was the first, a short story about Santosh, a domestic from Bombay, who accompanies his boss to Washington and enters into his own 'free state' as he moves away from tradition forms surprising relationships with a hubshi woman, an African-American woman. Despite the stereotypes and low opinion Indians held of blacks, even those of the servant class who were comfortable sleeping in the pavement of Bombay's streets, Santosh, in his own way, experiences his rupture from his Bombay roots through parallel developments with African-Americans in the US capital. Like the other tales in the book, Naipaul includes shrewd social commentary on the absence of real or authentic experiences, how everybody lies. For its fascinating take on Indian class and the Indians uprooted, so to speak, this stands out as one of the more interesting short stories penned by Naipaul. One wonders if this tale possibly influenced Aravind Adiga's White Tiger, which shares a similar interest or influence from African-American literature.

The other fascinating story was "Tell Me Who to Kill," which is recounted in first person by an unnamed brother. Born in poverty in an island that sounds just like Naipaul's Trinidad, the narrator places his hopes into helping his younger brother, Dayo, pursue an education and become more than what their island represents, in London. In a surprising twist for Naipaul, this narrative actually alludes to racial discrimination and the harshness of life for West Indian immigrants in the 'Mother Country.' Written in a kind of dialect, one almost feels as if this story was written by a Samuel Selvon rather than Naipaul. However, like the rest of this book, the brother deceives himself and the free state of escape from the West Indies does not work out well for him, as he becomes reliant on his only friend, a white Frank, whose liberal impulse to protect the narrator carries the stench of condescension. 

The novella, "In a Free State," is also an intriguing read, but too similar to A Bend in the River. The novella, however, is centered on an English homosexual administrative official in a country that sounds eerily similar to Uganda, which is in a state of political unrest due to timeless "tribal" conflict. Told through a third person narrator, "In a Free State" moves chronologically and physically from the 'English-Indian' capital to the Collectorate in the South, across valleys, along rivers, and the dark forests. Much like A Bend in the River, a Conradian image of Africa is pervasive, as well as the old mimicry of England or European ways in the former English colony (English hairstyles, resorts, towns, and buildings that resemble England). 

Depending on how one reads Conrad, Heart of Darkness can be either a pro-colonialist or anti-imperialist text, and much like his literary forebear, Naipaul falls somewhere in between, as someone who highlights the casual racism of the Europeans while never truly including an African character who is not more than stereotypes. Naipaul also hints at the protagonist character in A Bend in the River by attributing much of the cities and maintenance of businesses to the Indian community, a community in danger of deportations. Like the other stories, again one finds characters who are in a 'free state' of deception and fabrication, the Europeans lying to themselves about why they are in Africa in the first place and their role. Lots of postcolonial theory here, for those interested in Naipaul's take.

As for the prologue and epilogue, they are tied in thematically with the rest of the text. The prologue shares with "In a Free State" a similar critique of deportations, from Egypt sending the Greeks of Alexandria packing to Uganda expelling Indians. The future failure of Egyptian soldiers, of peasant origins, in the Sinai against Israel, also pertains to the Israeli military men training African soldiers in the novella. In both cases, the Africans (Ugandans, Egyptians) were hopeless when it came to matching the Israelis military, and one can see how the foreigners in both stories (Italians, Lebanese, Germans, Chinese) come to Africa with their own interests, economic or political. The Chinese 'circus,' impressing Egyptians in a hut, with their 'Red' dogma or the Lebanese merchants plotting how to enrich themselves in Egypt, for example, depict a postcolonial world in which deception is truly international. The 'desert children' outside the rest-house in Luxor are another 'circus,' performers for the Italian tourists who enjoy watching the 'sand animals.'

Overall, an interesting story suite here, but lacking the humor of his strictly Caribbean fiction or depth of A Bend in the River. Naipaul's masque of Africa is better illustrated in that subsequent work than what we have here, although he manages to impressively weave together the lives of so many distinct groups of people, across borders. For all fans of his fiction after A House for Mr. Biswas, this is essential reading. 

A Flag on the Island

"They don't pay primary school teachers a lot in Trinidad, but they allow them to beat their pupils as much as they want."

Naipaul's A Flag on the Island, a collection of short stories and a novella, is one of those transitional works of his 1960s output. Most of the book consists of short stories, usually set in Trinidad, with rich satire, dialect, and a keen sense of humor that permeates his early novels. There also exists intertextuality with the universe of The Mystic Masseur and Miguel Street, indicating that some of these stories were first written in the 1950s and one or two were initially written for the linked stories from Miguel Street. A few short stories take place in London, and deal with class or universal matters of the human condition, with the narrator presumably being Naipaul himself, if not someone just like him.

The last story in the text, "A Flag on the Island," is of a very different vein. Stylistically and thematically, the novella is more aligned with The Mimic Men and subsequent Naipaul novels. There are problems of mimicry and the colonial West Indian, postcolonial themes, an obsession with the smallness of the island, of Trinidad's apparent nonexistence, as well as sexual frustration. The main character of the novella, Frankie, is an American who served at the US base in Trinidad during the War. Taking advantage of his position, he profited from selling excess supplies and materials at the base, and is driven by this desire to buy or purchase fellowship from the poor 'natives.' In the end, all of his help is largely misguided.

The short novel is actually quite rich in satire, too. The fake or inauthentic Trinidad promoted by the tourism industry is a consistent theme, tying in quite well with other postcolonial themes of mimicry. One character in particular, Mr. Blackwhite (yes, that's his name), is a colonial writer who, at first, writes in the style of Jane Austen, and then writes interracial romances and stories with local color, supported or funded by the foundations and corporations. Here, I suspect, Naipaul is delineating the contradictions of West Indian identity and literature, as Mr. Blackwhite struggles to define himself and his writing. The foundation whites who fund Blackwhite want more of the same, but Blackwhite rebels against this with the idea of writing a narrative about ordinary, perfectly human blacks falling in love. Well, since that goes against what the white-controlled publishing world wants, Blackwhite loses their favor. 

Naipaul's comic genius really shines through these stories, providing excellent entertainment regardless of one's feelings on his dark novella. By far,"The Baker's Story" is the most amusing. Narrated in local vernacular by a Grenadian raised in Trinidad, it tells the story of how the poor black Grenadian, through hard work and taking advantage of the racial/class schema of occupations, becomes one of the wealthy businessmen with several bakery establishments, all operated through Chinese employers. The reason? Well, black Trinidadians won't buy food from blacks, and associate bakeries and groceries with the Chinese or whites. So, using a mixed-race Chinese boy, 'Yung Man' begins to prosper, marries a Chinese woman, and escapes poverty, in spite of his low education. While written in a hilarious manner, this short story speaks to the many racial divisions and stereotypes Trinidadians of all races and colors confine themselves in. If one only has the chance to read a single story from A Flag on the Island, this one is it.

Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion

"All action, all creation was a betrayal of feeling and truth."

Naipaul's Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion is a strange little novel. No characters of color, old age, search for meaning, possible Hindu symbolism (Shiva), and London. The novel's themes are consistent with some of Naipaul's earlier work, and perhaps part of his attempt to not be pigeonholed as a West Indian or Caribbean writer, even though all his early work draws on Trinidad and the Caribbean. The protagonist, an aging Mr. Stone who is about to retire, struggles to find meaning in his life, fights to have something pure or stand the test of time. In this regard, Mr. Stone is not too different from other protagonists of Naipaul's novels. 

For those seeking an amusing and short read, give this one a chance. There is a rich and almost condescending humor throughout the text, as well as social commentary on marriage, family, the 'changes' of London as more immigrant communities of color establish themselves, as well a deceptively thin overview of one man's attempt to establish himself in a world, beyond the seasons or routine.

The Mimic Men

"We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new."

Harsh and somewhat unfair characterization of the Caribbean from Naipaul, although there was and is an undeniable mimicry of Europe and North America among some West Indians of Naipaul's generation. The Mimic Men seems like Naipaul's harsher way to distance himself from Trinidad and the postcolonial government through Ralph Singh as a deracinated Indian, uprooted from his ancient Hindu past by the sea, shipwrecked in the Caribbean or London. I think Patrick French's biography is right to emphasize Naipaul's personal life as shaping novels like The Mimic Men or A Bend in the River, which clearly draw from the author's personal frustrations and identity crisis as an "East Indian of the West Indies."

Moreover, one sees here, in The Mimic Men, the shift in Naipaul's writing from the comic satire of his previous Trinidad novels. There are a few good jokes interspersed here (sheet paper pronounced by a Maltese in London, Eden being so black out of spite that Spite becomes his nickname at school), but The Mimic Men represents a shift to sexually frustrated, anxious, protagonists of displaced Indian descent. Like Saleem, Ralph Singh is an East Indian shipwrecked in the Caribbean island of Isabella, modelled on Naipaul's origins in Trinidad. Much like the trees carried away by ocean and river currents which arrive on Isabella's beaches, Ralph Singh is displaced and caught as an 'intermediate' Asiatic in a slave island of blacks and whites. Like other people of the 'transplantation,' Singh is a mimic men in many ways, becoming what others see of him and, like the decolonized world, operating through borrowed expressions, ideas, and civilizations. 

The problem with Naipaul is one of imposing the center's view of the periphery, the Caribbean. Instead of seeing the region as transplantations and focusing on his displacement from his Indian roots, Naipaul does not engage the Caribbean as a region of History, not solely European colonies for profit. Naipaul should have spent more time reading J.J. Thomas instead of Froude, more time understanding the Haitian Revolution instead of falling into the trap of racial theory and obsession with the Metropole. Much like his Middle Passage, a travelogue whose casual racism was too much for me to complete it, The Mimic Men shares a similarly dismal view of the early postcolonial Caribbean. 

While there were certainly deep contradictions and a problem of 'mimicry' in the West Indies, and an issue of racial divisions which plagued Trinidad & Tobago, Naipaul's perspective as a postcolonial Mandarin who could not return for good to Trinidad, but accepts a sort of stasis in a London hotel through the fictional character of Ralph Singh, is quite disturbing and ignores how the societies of the Caribbean were only copies of the allegedly superior West. I could rant endlessly about this novel and its complexities, its memoir structure, how it moves back and forth chronologically or even its universal implications of mimicry and identity (Sandra, perhaps one of the most interesting female characters in Naipaul's corpus, or the university students at the School in London, for example, all are 'playing' in their own ways that mirror or differ from that of the 'half-societies' of the West Indies), but I shall leave that for future posts.

On another disturbing note, the colonial politicians (Browne, Singh, etc.) and the experiments at satisfying distress while ensnared in mimicry, actually reminded me of Idi Amin Dada. The Mimic Men was written in Uganda, where Naipaul met Theroux, and actually contains a reference to colonial politicians 'turning' the tables and having whites serve them, in a troubling portent of Idi Amin's photographs of whites carrying him. These kinds of token symbolic decolonisation did not work for the fictional Caribbean island of Isabella. They most definitely did little for Uganda under Idi Amin, who took power a few years after The Mimic Men was published.

Note: The Kindle Edition is full of grammatical or formatting errors, which made this a harder read than necessary. Fortunately, those formatting or editing mistakes for the Kindle edition were not as numerous as they could have been.

Some Favorite Quotes

"The career of the colonial politician is short and ends brutally. We lack order. Above all, we lack power. We mistake words and the acclamation of words for power; as soon as our bluff is called we are lost."

"Flight to the greater disorder, the final emptiness: London and the home counties."

"They talk of the pessimism of the young as they talk of atheism and revolt: it is something to be grown out of."

"I no longer seek to find beauty in the lives of the mean and the oppressed. Hate oppression; fear the oppressed."

"How right our Aryan ancestors were to create gods. We seek sex, and are left with two private bodies on a stained bed. The larger erotic dream, the god, has eluded us. It is so whenever, moving out of ourselves, we look for extensions of ourselves. It is with cities as it is with sex. We seek the physical city and find only a conglomeration of private cells. In the city as nowhere else, we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains, it is the god of the city that we pursue in vain."

"He was like me: he needed the guidance of other men's eyes."

"In London I had no guide. There was no one to link my present with my past, no one to note my consistencies or inconsistencies."

"We become what we see of ourselves in the eyes of others."

"For there is no such thing as history nowadays; there are only manifestos and antiquarian research."

"Politicians are people who truly make something out of nothing. They have few concrete gifts to offer. They are not engineers or artists or makers. They are manipulators; they offer themselves as manipulators."

"Those student associations! Playing at being students, playing at being questioning and iconoclastic, playing at being young and licensed, playing at being in preparation for the world! The dishonesty of the young!"

"To be born on an island like Isabella, an obscure  New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder."

"We came out into the Indian areas, the flat lands where rice and sugarcane grew. My father spoke of the voyage, so recent but already in our strange hemisphere so remote, which the fathers and indeed some of the people we saw had made from another continent, to complete our own little bastard world."

"But in our slogans, we assumed the role of metropolitan party-givers. We did so easily; at Isabella Imperial, we were natural impersonators."

"Eden was something of a buffoon. He was the blackest boy in the school and for some time was known as Spite because some boys said he was black for spite."

Cincinnati Goddamn: Some Brief Thoughts

Cincinnati Goddamn is certainly relevant to the times, but could have used tighter editing to cut down the length. The film also failed to take advantage of Michelle Alexander, but Manning Marable, local activists, and the Owensby family bring the horrific stories of Cincinnati police brutality to life. Marable, by far, was the best 'academic' interviewed in the documentary, particularly for highlighting the economic conditions and neoliberal push in urban policy and development across the US.

A deeper and more critical analysis would have done a better job placing racial segregation in the city into a broader perspective, highlighted mistakes made by the attorneys representing the family of Owensby, and avoid the trap of respectability politics. I am not sure it it was intentional on the director's part, but it was disturbing that only two victims of killer cops were featured in the film, and the main victim case focused on Owensby, a military man with a daughter. What about the other young African-Americans brutalized and killed by the police? The documentary tries to highlight this, but should have done a better job including the stories of the other prominent victims given its length. 

The interviews with locals, protesters, footage of the riots, commentary on the anti-black curfew laws, and Marable really made this documentary work, to me at least. Unquestionably bleak, yet prophetic of the recent turmoil in Baltimore and Ferguson. I believe the documentary should be screened to all audiences sympathetic and engaged in the Black Lives Matter movement.

October Song

A lovely jazz piano piece that takes my breath away. I am not familiar with Johnny Raducanu's work, but if he's capable of expressing such lyrical beauty in jazz ballads like this, I will be checking out his work. 

An Overdue Explanation

“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

Those who frequent this blog have probably noticed the many changes. In addition to changing the title (in homage to a famous Naipaul line), I have also dropped the Pan-Africanist colors and general layout for something quite different. In order to explain exactly what drove me to change the blog, I must explain exactly why I started blogging in the first place.

When I first started blogging in late 2010, it was mainly as a way to avoid inundating social media accounts with excessively long posts or links. Discussions with friends who had been blogging for years inspired me to start what had been, initially, my personal online soapbox. The blog's changing nature and seemingly random subject matter reflects that early approach.

After sharing essays, music posts, rants, book reviews, and my own rather quirky humor, or lack thereof, I realized this blog has actually become one of my main hobbies. Time has also passed rapidly, and I have lost interest in the old layout, color scheme, and rather puerile title. The new title, The World Is What It Is, is more mature and less self-centered or silly, in my humble opinion. The idea struck me after reading Patrick French's well-written but disturbing biography of Naipaul. While I disagree with Naipaul on countless topics, I find his fiction engaging, containing smooth prose, possessing comic genius (in his Trinidad novels, at least), thought-provoking, and sometimes pessimistic, yet encompassing the contradictions of the postcolonial modern world around us. What better line encapsulates that then Naipaul's famous quote from A Bend in the River?

Returning to the subject of the blog, however, I  plan on finding some sort of color scheme and layout that works. For now, it will remain as it is with some minor changes along the way. Who knows, perhaps in another couple of years, I will have to change the title again.