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Marvin X/El Muhajir, Beyond Religion
toward Spirituality, Essays on Consciousness.
Black
Bird Press, Paradise Ca, 2007, 281 pages, $19.95
Review by Ayodele Nzinga
In his introduction
to, Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality, the X
man says: “How you begin is how you will end.” He goes
on to describe a new relationship with himself and joy.
Full circle, the boy from Fresno is a man of the world,
master of the small story, in possession of his joy and
a child like wisdom, simple, honest, and fresh.
The world according
to Marvin X is in beautiful place to visit but it is
also in serious need of a more spiritually imbued story
of itself.
El Muhajir has been
teaching us through the medium of poetry, drama,
lecture, and essay for four decades; this offering
signals his attention to his continuing personal
evolution. One of his greatest strengths as a
storyteller is he is never afraid to share what he has
learned. In the pages of Beyond Religion Toward
Spirituality Marvin celebrates the spiritual nature of
man and the world in a series of moving non-fiction
essays.
He speaks in an
authoritative voice in what he calls the fourth quarter
of a remarkable run. X is clear, concise, and straight
razor sharp. His lyrical use of North American African
vernacular remains as clear and as musical as his poetry
and his undiminished power of observation touches all
the nooks and crannies of his life and our own.
As usual Marvin’s
view is a wide one that takes in his subject from a
variety of vantage points. This volume is simple, yet
thorough in its scope. Flowing from a seemingly endless
well, Marvin’s eye moves like water from the
intricacies of love, to the nurturing of youth, into the
spiritual aspects of music, as his pen makes the leap
from the personal to the universal.
In Beyond
Religion Toward Spirituality Marvin has compiled an
“All you ever need to know” compendium for anyone with a
mind, heart, and soul living on earth. These are the
musings of a well-seasoned life traveler with stories
that instruct and inspire. In the tradition of “I wish I
could tell you the Truth”, essays, 2005, and “Something
Proper,” autobiography, 1998, Marvin blesses us with
the gift of his scholarship embodied in our lived
reality. Here philosophy is given flesh we understand,
for here is a philosopher of and from us, bold enough to
tell us the truth, continually serving us something
proper, and ready to move us beyond religion to an
enlivened spirituality.
“Let it be said
that we tried to expand our consciousness, to get high
with the Most High (Ali). And if we only touched the hem
of His garment, it is better than not having touched Him
at all.”
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Marvin X/ El Muhajir, Beyond
Religion Toward Spirituality, Essays on Consciousness.
This collection of “small stories” is another
well-written chapter in the ongoing grand narrative of
Marvin X, available from Black Bird Press, POB 1317,
Paradise CA 95967 , $19.95.
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Ayodele Nzinga is a dramatist,
arts lecturer and performance poet living in the San
Francisco Bay Area. She is the Artistic Director of The
Lower Bottom Playaz and The Sister Thea Bowman Memorial
Theater in West Oakland. She is a force to be reckoned
with on the West Coast spoken word circuit. Well known
for her take no prisoners style as the WordSlanger she
is loved by vets and admired by young poets. She is
affiliated with Marvin X’s Recovery Theater. She
holds an MA and an MFA in Writing and Consciousness. She
is currently a candidate for PhD at the California
Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco CA.Ayodele Nzinga
is doing her PhD thesis on Marvin X and the Black Arts
Movement.
anzinga@sbcglobal.net
posted 7 March 2007
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
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update 1 July 2008
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