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Beyond the Skin Trade
How does black nationalism stay relevant in the age
of Barack Obama?
By Victor Lavalle
When I was a boy, I
prayed for straight hair. You have to understand, I grew
up on heavy metal. Iron Maiden and Judas Priest to
start. Then Anthrax and Exodus, Megadeth and Metallica.
My friends and I gathered in living rooms and basements
and empty lots and banged our heads to “Damage, Inc.”
and “I Am the Law.” If you nearly snapped your neck, you
were doing something right. We were a pretty wild mix: a
Persian kid, a Korean, a couple of white guys, and
me—the only one with a tight, curly Afro. The rest had
straight hair, grown long, and when they thrashed to the
music, their hair bounced and whipped like it was
supposed to. I’d watch them pull off this casual magic
and wish I’d been so blessed. But I was black, and there
was no enchantment in that. It actually felt like a kind
of curse. I’m so embarrassed to admit any of this.
Now, heavy metal
may be to blame for any number of ills (my tinnitus, for
instance), but I can’t really say it spawned my
self-loathing. Instead, let’s head upstairs, to my
family’s apartment in Flushing, Queens. We won’t meet
the guilty party there, just another link in a long
chain.
My mom grew up in
East Africa.
Uganda. A member of a tribe called the
Baganda, the largest ethnic group in the country.
Daughter of a proud and courageous mother and father.
They worked to eject the British colonial powers; they
were one small part of the
Pan-African movement. My
grandfather helped oust the British and set up schools
in rural Uganda. He made sure his own kids were
educated. For college, my mother packed off to Canada.
In Kitchener-Waterloo, she was denied housing,
mistreated and maligned in school and on the street.
Finally, she moved to America to escape the racism. That
poor woman—she didn’t understand what was happening to
her. What had already happened. Somewhere, flying over
the Atlantic Ocean maybe, she’d stopped being a
Muganda,
a Ugandan, or even African. She had become black.
The original
American slaves weren’t black, either. They were
Ashanti
and Ewe and
Fanti, among others. The slaves’ path to
Christianity has been told and retold as the great
conversion story of Africans in the Americas. But that’s
not the only conversion story. There’s the legal
conversion: from humans being into chattel. And there’s
the cultural conversion: A wealth of ethnicities became
one black race. This must have shocked those Africans as
much as it did my mother.
With the earliest
instances of rebellion against the slave system—whether
armed insurrection or covert escape or the liberation of
literacy—black
nationalism was born. Even before it had
a name, it was a practice. Just staying alive was an act
of defiance. Thus every black person was a part of the
resistance. Up, you mighty race!
My father is white.
As the decades
passed,
black
nationalism created and re-created itself
in this country.
David Walker and
Harriet Tubman’s role
in shaping abolitionism;
Marcus Garvey’s model of
separate but formidable black entrepreneurship; the
civil rights struggle; Black Power; the
Nation of Islam;
the Nation of Gods and Earths. Each can be categorized
as a form of black nationalism. But no matter which era
or organization, whether they were capitalists or
Marxists or advocates of repatriation, they all seemed
to assume one basic truth: We’re all in this together.
Rich or poor,
southerner or northerner, dark skinned or light, black
folks are on the same side. Remember
Marcus Garvey’s
call: “Africa for the Africans!” And
Malcolm X’s line:
“When I speak of the South, I mean south of Canada. The
whole US is the South.” (Though my mother could’ve
schooled him on that.) Our own schools, our own
churches; maybe someday even our own state. But check
out the sleight-of-hand America had managed. What really
held us together besides the system we opposed? What
would black nationalism be without a common enemy?
* *
*
It seems all
Americans are now contractually required to bring up
Barack Obama at least once a week. In either wonder or
disgust, cynicism or cloudy-eyed glee. As a black
person, it’s actually common courtesy to mention my man
at least once a day. But right now, I’m more concerned
with Obama’s mother,
Ann Dunham Soetoro. The white woman
from Kansas reminds me of my own mother, the black woman
from Uganda. It’s not the wanderlust or the tenacity
(though those are comparable, too). Instead, it’s a
choice each woman made. About who would father her
child. And why.
In
Dreams from My Father, Obama recounts going to see
Black
Orpheus with his mother. Halfway through the movie,
he’s pretty tired of it, the depiction of black folks
being far from complex or interesting. But then he looks
at his mother: “Her face, lit by the blue glow of the
screen, was set in a wistful gaze. At that moment, I
felt as if I were being given a window into her heart,
the unreflective heart of her youth. I suddenly realized
that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing
on the screen, the reverse image of Conrad’s dark
savages, was what my mother had carried with her to
Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the
simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white
middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another
life: warm, sensual, exotic, different.”
My own mother’s
life strikes me as a fair capsule summary of the black
experience in America. Reaching these shores as an
African, not so much proud of this fact as unaware she
should feel ashamed. Then made aware. While she didn’t
take over any buildings or arm herself, my mother did
bring my ailing grandmother over from Uganda to care for
her. She worked as a legal secretary while helping her
brother get through college. I count these as her years
of resistance. But eventually her resistance ran out.
My mother and I
have always had a good relationship, very forthright,
and whenever I used to ask her why she married my
father, she would offer only one answer: “So you would
be light-skinned.”
My mom is going to
beat my ass if she ever sees this. I can’t imagine
anything that would embarrass her more. It’s not that
she never said it, not that it isn’t true, but to say it
out loud. To print it. And in a place where white folks
might read it! These expressions of self-loathing go on,
but you don’t admit them in mixed company. If you do,
well, what the hell kind of black person are you?
And here’s why
Ann Dunham Soetoro reminds me of my mother: Blackness was
more of an idea than a reality for both, yet one of the
most important choices of each woman’s life was based on
it. One woman yearned for it, while the other wished to
escape. Either way, blackness (and whiteness) defined
them.
I’m not saying my
mother, or Obama’s, made her choice consciously. My
mother’s answer to my paternity question always seemed
like insight she’d gained after the fact. Maybe a way to
recast loss as a kind of victory. But consciously or
not, she wanted her child to be lighter than she was.
She believed my life in America would be easier that
way. And she was right. It has been.
Faced with her
life’s evidence, she couldn’t have imagined a rat-fuck,
heartless, shit-stain system like this country’s would
ever die. Resist or surrender: Those were a black
person’s only choices in these United States. That would
never change.
But then it did.
I remember watching
Obama’s victory speech on a JumboTron out on 125th
Street. I watched him at that podium in Grant Park while
I stood in a mixed-race crowd in the middle of a
revitalized Harlem. What world is this? I wondered even
as I hooted and hollered. Who could’ve imagined such
sights and wonders? When I finally reached my mother on
the phone, she sounded even more awestruck than I was.
* *
*
I’m sick of
discussing black nationalism. I’m tired of all the
dourness and doomsaying; of the grimace that’s required
whenever we discuss it and blackness in general; of the
countless humorless men and women who scold every
impulse toward comfort or laughter or, dare I say it,
optimism. I’m sick of the same old forecast for
blackness: gloom followed by clouds of hail.
On January 20,
2009, the president of the United States was a black
man, or blackish if you want to nitpick. On January 30,
2009, the
head of the Republican National Committee was
a black man. And in the 2008 election race,
a black
woman ran as the presidential nominee of the
Green
Party. What is black nationalism to make of all this? A
system of thought, a method of living, that sought
empowerment through opposition now looks a lot like the
leaders of the system it opposed. I’m not suggesting
that the existence of these few black leaders indicates
the end of hard times for black Americans. What I’m
wondering is this: If a disempowered black person
opposes an empowered black person, which one is the
black nationalist?
This essay was
supposed to be an obituary, a eulogy, for
black
nationalism, but I’ve spent a good deal of it going on
about my mother. She might not believe me, but I mean
all these admissions and revelations as a testament to
her and, by extension, to black nationalism. Who can
judge what he can’t understand? Not me. And our elders
battled through some genuinely incomprehensible shit.
But if the final
goal of
black
nationalism is freedom and autonomy for
black folks, then maybe that even means becoming
liberated from our debts to our forebears. Not to forget
them, but to bury them with honor. Then maybe we’ll get
to devise new solutions to old problems. Even my silly
little headbanging woes turned out to have a pretty
simple solution, one I figured out only years later. I
didn’t need straight hair to thrash, I just grew
dreadlocks. Voilà—free to be a black metalhead.
I imagine telling
all this to my mother. I can see us in her living room,
on her powder-blue couch. She listens to my desire, my
need, to think differently about our place in the world.
To set the old burdens down. She nods, and when I’m
done, she reaches out to touch my cheek. She smiles, but
not with joy, just wistfulness. I see the back of her
dark brown hand in contrast to the side of my
honey-colored face. She sighs. Then she speaks. Only
five words: “Easy for you to say.”
Victor LaValle is the author
of the novel
The Ecstatic (Crown, 2002).
Source:
Bookforum. Apr/May 2009* * * *
*
Literature from
the Edge—by Jeffrey Trachtenberg—24 July 2009—Despite
the advance acclaim,
Big Machine faces major hurdles in finding a
broad audience. Mr. Jackson says that it has always
been difficult to market black literary fiction. “Black
writers don’t have a support network that helps them
publish their short stories, and the encouragement they
get is often for familiar material,” he says.
In recent years,
some black literary writers have managed to garner
critical acclaim and mainstream sales, including Colson
Whitehead,
Edward P. Jones and
Edwidge Danticat, but they are the exceptions, Mr.
Jackson says.
Ishmael Reed, the
veteran author of
Mumbo Jumbo and
Reckless Eyeballing, said in an email that Mr.
LaValle is part of a group of African-American writers
that has “reintroduced a fiction with comic
possibilities, entertaining fantastical situations
without losing a sharp social message.” As a stylist,
Mr. LaValle employs a sly wit and deadpan humor.
“Heroin, like I said before, robs you of your empathy,”
he writes in Big Machine. “And that’s a problem, because
empathy is what separates human beings from teenage
boys.”—Online.WSJ
* * * *
*
Big Machine: A Novel
By
Victor LaValle
The Known World
By Edward P.
Jones
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*
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Ancient African Nations
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Enjoy!
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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
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 9 March 2011
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