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Books by Marvin X
Love and War: Poems /
In the Crazy House Called America /
Woman: Man's Best Friend /
Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality
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* * * * Ancestors and Spirituality
By
Marvin X
They are in the land. We ask
permission to come on the land. We bring the medicine
man, the Yoruba priestess, the imam to ask permission,
to bless the land. We know they are there. We hear them,
we know they hear us. Ancestors speak, speak to us this
day. Forgive us our sin of not liberating the land, of
leaving you unfed, unacknowledged, as though unwanted,
yet you carried us all the way to this moment, you were
there, are yet there, in the creek, swamps, rivers,
oceans, forest, woods.
I see you now as I sit on the train.
I look out the window at you running through the woods,
the forest, swimming the lake, I bathe with you while
sitting on the train. I see you on the plantation, in
the hut making love to your lover man. I see you making
love to the master. You fight as he rapes you, you
resist until he is gone, you resist. I hear you in the
hut, there is hate in the hut.
I see you in the window of my train
coming through the South, heading West to my home. The
trees speak to me and haunt me. I turn away in tears. I
cannot bear to look at the pine trees, the moss-wood in
the swamp. I am transfixed, cannot move, frozen in time,
in centuries of time, of cotton, rice, sugar cane. I
must make peace with you, O trees, O ancestors buried in
unknown graves. For I have sinned, I have forgotten you.
I have not talked with you, even when you spoke to me,
tried to make me understand all that happened, how you
got here, the terror, the red flag leading you down to
the shore, to the boat out to the big ship, the Middle
Passage. You screamed and I screamed, screamed in denial
because I didn't want to hear, hear the truth, the pain,
the fire, the bones, ashes, the wail, the toil, the sun,
moon, stormy nights, words in your language, forbidden
to utter a sound in our Mother tongue.
I cannot look out at the trees, there
is guilt, for what am I doing now to avenge you, what?
Only of late have we made the Maafa pilgrimage to the
ocean, dressed in white to let them know we know, only
now have we said forgive us for we know not what we have
done by forgetting you.
We forgot ourselves, and so our
children forget us, do not acknowledge us, disrespect
us, for the chain is broken and must be repaired. We
hold hands and pray as the ocean tide comes upon us, as
our white robes become wet in this baptism by water in
remembrance of those many thousands gone, the millions
gone whose shoulders we stand upon, without whom we
would be nothing, less than clay, sand, mud. Yet we are
what we are today because of you and all you did in the
night and in the day, from can't see to can't see.
Such is the gift of ancestors. There
is no spirituality without ancestors. Without ancestors
there is nothing, no air, no sun, no bone, no blood, no
night no day.
We can imagine we are all that and
all this but we are not. They are the reason for our
season. So we salute them and let them know in our daily
prayers, in our food, in our walks and talks for they
are talking to us and most of all, they are listening.
They want us only to be our Divine
self, nothing less, no animal, no beast, no fiend, no
dog, no bitch, no pimp, no ho, but Divine self, beyond
human, Divine. That is why they came, that is why they
endured all the terror all the trauma, to raise up a
Divine people for eternity, not fools, clowns, buffoons,
toms, Divine people who see with the Third Eye, the eye
of the Spirit that cannot be deceived.
Source:
Toward Radical Spirituality, Black Bird Press,
2007 (c) 2006 by Marvin X (El Muhajir)
Marvin X has given permission to
Harvard University to publish his poem "For El Haji
Rasul Taifa" from Love and War: Poems by Marvin X
(1995). The poem will appear in The Encyclopedia of
Islam in America Volume II, Greenwood Press, edited
by Dr. Jocelyne Cesari of Harvard's Islam in the West
Program. Mr. X is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology
Muslim American Literature, University of
Arkansas Press, edited by Dr. Mojah Khaf. He is also in
the forthcoming Muslim American Drama, Temple
University.
posted 20 June 2006
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank B. Wilderson, III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student, Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America.
Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations
about love within and across
the color line and cultural
divides are as provocative
as his politics; despite
some distracting
digressions, this is a
riveting memoir of
apartheid's last days.—Publishers
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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