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After Katrina
By Mackie Blanton
An Introduction
By Rudolph Lewis
The more I live, the more I seem to
live through others. These others have been a bridge by
which I have gotten to know myself and a means by which
I have been able to create myself, that is, come to know
that person I darkly want to be. I was telling my friend
Sharif today as we ate the corn beef sandwiches he
brought over for lunch, I am a kind of empath. Or to
improvise an Armenian expression I feel the pain
of others. In that appropriation I get to know my own
pain, the life that is within me, in the Other.
This kind of reflective writing style
that unfolds here under my fingers is what has occurred
after a reading of Mackie Blanton's travelogue, "After
Katrina." Maybe that is not the right word. In another
place I have called it a report. Maybe Mackie will
choose some more revealing term when he has completed
his manuscript of his life of teaching and learning in
Turkey. There he is a visiting professor. We
corresponded just before he left for Izmir, Turkey,
where he is a Fulbright Senior Lecturer. I asked if he
might sent us reports of his stay in Turkey. I have a
fear of flying and it has been more than twenty years
since I have been on a plane.
For the last four years, I have
received travel reports from Kalamu ya
Salaam , who flies all over the country with the
same ease as I stroll up to North and Pennsylvania.
Seemingly, Kalamu does not give a second thought to
being five miles above the earth and it seems to be the
same to millions daily. Such flight for me is the
heaviest of decisions, which would cause me to scurry to
my knees to talk with God. I have been on a plane four
times: to New York and back; to Zaire and back; to
Louisiana and back, to San Francisco and back to New
Orleans. I find myself blessed that my feet touched the
ground in those flighty jaunts. I have sworn I'd never
get on another plane.
So you see, I will never see Turkey
for myself, except through the eyes and experiences of
others. Travel literature, fiction, and stories of other
worlds beyond my self-limited circle is important for me
to live my life out more fully, to take in those worlds
beyond the continental United States. I have exchanged
emails with Mackie in the last six months, probably the
most intense period of my life. I watched the
destruction of our beloved city of New Orleans, the
anguish and suffering of its most vulnerable citizens.
And like many, I have not gotten over that tragedy. It
has not led me to utter despair as many of those who
have committed suicide
of one sort or another.
This national tragedy has rather
pushed me harder to do what I can do, today. For in
these times of our cowboy national government we expect
there are other disasters on the horizon. That is, the
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are galloping toward
every major city where there is a concentration of poor
working class people. Like the prophets of old, the
social and ethical weathermen of bygone years, I have
been sending out daily bulletins of warning and hope.
That it is not too late, yet, to turn from social
disaster and the fires of hell.
Of course, I am not the only one who
is about this work, and have my fears. Though in Turkey,
Mackie Blanton has kept abreast of what is happening
here in America to his beloved New Orleans. He knows, as
most of us, it will never be the same. And maybe that is
a good thing, in a sense.
New Orleans of the
early 80s when I lived there was not the
New
Orleans I saw last summer, pre-Katrina. The city
seemed much more packed in, much more in a state of
desperation. My friend
Lee Meitzen Grue,
the poet of Bywater, was complaining fiercely about the
increase of break-ins, the dope trade, and drug
addictions. Soon after he picked me up in his old
car, Kalamu told me about the 25% graduation rate at
Frederick Douglass High School where he was teaching
digital video classes.
So it may take another decade or more
before New Orleans regains its near half-million
population, before the Flood. The City that Care Forgot
has lost much of its
black middle-class and nearly all of it its black poor. And maybe
its heart and soul, that which made the heart glad even
in the midst of going without. There are still a few
musicians and poets about town, and a few students.
Though I have known Mackie Blanton
for more than twenty years, I have just got to know
about his personal life only within the last six months.
I did not know he had a wife and daughter, or the
contents of his house. I have published him before. I
have here at my desk an old copy of a poetry journal I
founded in 1985, Cricket: Poems
& Other Jazz. Mackie's poem "Tearoses and Pursestrings,"
which sprawls over the page is the last one in an issue
that contains the poems of Kalamu ya Salaam, "Haiku No
30", Richard Katrovas, "The Public Mirror";
Marcus
Bruce Christian, "An Old Dog's Advice" and "The Big
Dog's Daughter"; Maxine Cassin, "Programming an Evening
Away from Home"; Lee Meitzen Grue, "New Orleans in the
Rain"; Yusef Komunyakaa, "from Crescent City Blues";
Grace Bauer, "Fat Tuesday"; Labertha McCormick, "Eyes";
James Baptiste, "Street Corna Brother"; Sharon Olinka,
"Bring Back the Beatniks"; Mona Lisa Saloy, "French
Market Morning." And the drawings of Jesse Benvenuto.
Surprisingly, 28 March 2000, Mackie
Blanton, as Associate Dean of Student Life at the
University of New Orleans arranged through UNO, where I
taught during the early-mid 80s, my receiving of The
Marcus B. Christian Community Service Award, for the
work I had done in trying to restore Christian's work to
the African-American canon. What a delight, he had
thought of me. But I suppose I got to know much more
about Mackie's personal life when he sent out the
missile Eh,
La Bas, Cherie! to assure his friends and associates
he had survived the Flood. It expressed his hope of the
future and that he would only temporarily delay his trip
to Izmir, Turkey.
Mackie had sent me a couple poems
before the Flood between 2001 and 2005: Beers and
Transformation ;
The
Struggle Odes, poems on
the genocide in Rwanda. And in October of 2005, while in
Turkey, he sent me "Neighbors
and Invaders." So several days ago, on receiving an email from him, I
asked of his promise to do some travel reports from
Turkey. He send me several pieces: a revised version of
his poem "Neighbors
and Invaders"; a prose piece
"Earthquakes
and Baklava"
about his first experience of an earthquake; and the
philosophical piece
"The
Lens in Platos Eye" on art, memory, and the Real.
They are the first three chapters of his travel
manuscript. They are quite personal and quite perfect. I
think you will enjoy them as I have.
Below is a photo he sent today of him
in his room on his laptop. The other contains him and
his colleagues. Mackie is on the far left. I told Mackie
it appears as if Turkey had treated him well for he
looked like a Turk and ten years younger. He looks good.
posted 16 March 2006 |
