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Books by Cliff
Chandler
The Paragons
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Devastated
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Vengeance Is Mine
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In
Search Of Our Culture
An
American Travels to Marrakech
By Cliff Chandler
After years of
writing without a purpose I finally decided to become a serious
writer. In doing so I realized that I would have to go to Africa
in search of the missing elements of our culture. We have been
bombarded by the fact that slave owners had erased our
culture.
My solution in my
first trip over the pond was to go to Africa. I chose North
Africa because I knew that I wouldn’t find anyone resembling
me in deepest Africa. That was confirmed in the airport in
Casablanca when I stood in line to exchange some currency.
A six-foot African in regal attire stepped in front of me
and pushed ahead of me. I guess it was my blue blazer and
business like attire. I ignored him and thanked him for
convincing me that I had made the right choice in choosing
Marrakech.
I arrived in
Casablanca about 10 a.m, my plane to Marrakech would not leave
until eleven that evening, so I put that unpleasant experience
with the African chief in a special place and took a taxi into
Casablanca. The ride into the city was fascinating. I observed
farmers working in the fields using hand tools, shanties, and
farm houses similar to the houses one observed traveling South
on single lane highways in the fifties. The difference is the
houses were constructed of terracotta. The most amazing site was
a small house on the side of the road. The door was open and I
saw a homemade kitchen table covered with cheesecloth. The only
thing missing was the tin roofs one found on southern houses in
the thirties.
The Moroccan people
were warm. Everyone appeared to be interested in me. By the way,
several persons attempted to speak to me in Arabic. It was as my
teacher had implied in class one day while discussing his trip
to Marrakech. Many of them thought that I was Moroccan. My taxi
driver in a traditional manner announced Casablanca and stopped.
I paid him, got out of the cab, and stood on the corner
observing the city. A woman approached and asked for some money
and I pretended not to have any, using my New York mannerisms.
She said, “Come to Casablanca by plane and have no money.”
Her gesture was not kind. Casablanca was too much like New York,
so I entered one of the nicer hotels, had a great lunch, and
hailed a taxi back to the airport.
At the airport I went
out onto the observation deck and observed our culture. The
worker’s conversations were energetic, humorous. Their
approach to work was casual. A plane arrived and was directed to
its dock and at the last possible moment the service vehicles
arrived to perform their task. It was done in a relaxed manner.
There was no tension.
The other difference
was the service vehicles pace was a little faster than we are
accustomed to, the brothers and sisters motored up to the crafts
and stopped on a dime. Conversations and laughter were
everywhere and if two or three brothers were conversing it
sounded like a party. My first lesson was that we have not lost
our zest for life and that we as a people do what we are asked
to do well.
True to my
observations the plane took off at a seventeen-degree tilt,
throttles wide open. The curtain between first class and coach
surrendering to the force of gravity floated towards my seat. At
the pinnacle of the assent the plane leveled off and began its
decent into Marrakech. During our climb a hypnotic, sensuous
voice in Arabic made an announcement.
I forgot about the flight and dreamed of Shaharazad and
the Arabian Nights. My fleeting moment of romance was
bumped back to reality when our plane landed. We were in
Marrakech.
I convinced Customs
that I was able to take care of my expenses in Morocco by doing
a very corny thing. I showed him my credit card. After which he
said in his best English, “Okay.” I picked up my luggage and
made my way to the taxi stand. The driver asked for my
destination in French, to which I replied, “Holiday Inn.” He
helped me into the car and headed into town. We didn’t
converse. He stopped at the hotel and it resembled the Holiday
Inn, but Holiday Inn it was not. I didn’t have a reservation
because it was my intention to rent an apartment in town.
I prepared for my
visit to Marrakech by visiting the Moroccan Embassy in New York
City, the Board Of Health, where I was told, “If you aren’t
taking anything over there, there isn’t any need for shots.”
My next stop was to purchase a book on Marrakech. The book
covered the history of the city and included a current map.
The following morning
I walked from my hotel to the Medina, commonly referred to as
“The Kasbah.” One
the way I was solicited by the local hustlers, who addressed me
as “brother” until I was a block away from the hotel. I
turned a corner and walked through the neighborhood. A young man
walking in a hip Harlem style glided out of a small self-styled
store that resembled the shack in black neighborhoods in the South.
It was constructed of a huge Coca Cola sign on one side and
found objects completed the other side. There was a primitive
shed used as an entrance covered with roofing material.
At that moment I
thought, I’ve spent all of this money and traveled nine
hours to end up in Harlem. The young man spoke and things
fell into their proper place. His gestures were ours, but he
spoke in his native tongue Arabic. I relaxed and continued my
adventure. It was fascinating, motor scooters, donkeys, people
on foot, all of them carrying their food in one manner or
another. I turned a final corner and there it was the walls of
the old city and “The Kasbah.”
I entered the city
and walked through the tiny streets without being noticed. Some
of the people there looked at me strangely, but that happened
because I didn’t acknowledge them. I decided to stop in a shop
and buy a few gifts. The sensation was the same until I started
to bargain. The owner asked me where was I from? When I said New
York, he shook his head and said that he thought I was from
Morocco.
This was not a ploy
to help him sell his merchandise. He had his assistant bring in
some tea, mint tea, the best fresh tea I have ever tasted.
We sat there and talked for an hour, after which I told
him I had just arrived and I wanted to go back to my hotel to
rest. He gave me another shocker. He said that I resembled the
King, and I said, oh sure.
I returned to the
hotel and went to my room. It was in the middle of the day so I
decided to take a nap. The phone rang and the concierge invited
me down to the bar for typical Moroccan food. I thanked her,
went down to the bar. While I was away a busload of tourists had
arrived and they were sunning their new swimsuits by the pool.
The bartender greeted me in English, I ordered a drink and
headed for the buffet where I found fried chicken, potato salad,
red beets, and macaroni and cheese. I asked the bartender if
this was a joke. He studied me for a moment and said, “This is
typical Moroccan food.”
We were kidnapped,
stolen and our families destroyed in the slave markets of
Africa, and America, but we did not lose our culture. Our labor
built America, our ability to adapt to hardships created
thousands of industries. Our humor and our music are great gifts
the world has ever received. But the thing we lost was our love
and appreciation for each other. Black Africans who sold us took
our dignity away. White men with fire sticks and wooden ships
could not have developed the theft of our people without the
help of black Africans.
The Moroccans I
visited with were the common people. They are still struggling
to survive. The ruling classes of black Africans maintain their
superior attitude towards us today, and yield only to those of
us who are able to fill their coffers. I wonder how long the
Pan-Africanist would last in the Sudan. And I wonder where would
they start in their search for their beginning. It is easy to
find a relative in Africa if you have the means for the search.
I am not anti African. As a matter of fact I want to thank the
kidnappers and thieves who stole us and sold us.
We must learn to love
ourselves and in the process learn to love each other. We must
return the respect we had for each other here in America before
we had laws to protect us. We must give back to our communities
to those who will accept us and we must return with real values.
My visit to Marrakech taught me that I am an American and in the
process I saw America for the first time.
We must reject
second-class citizenship by refusing to be second-class. That
means that we are as good as anyone unless we give others the
power of making us surrender. I don’t like the term
African-American. I am Black and I am damn sure an American; and
as such I demand everything an American is entitled to. I found
my culture and I hope other will take their journey and find
their magic.
I have visited
Morocco several times since my first visit. My wife and I have
friends there. It is unfortunate that the current political
atmosphere discourages foreign travel. By the way, my concerns
about travel here in our country is the same as it is about
traveling abroad. Let us hope that the pressures that create
terrorism will succumb to logic and that the madness will cease.
Let us hope that people of the world will select competent
leaders, and that they will find the road to peace.
The most beautiful
memory I have of North Africa is the community sitting out in
the parks in the evenings. The nights are crime free and it
reminds me of the night in the thirties and forties when we did
the same thing. The whole community visited Central Park, we
slept with our windows open, and we were proud of who we are. It
was a time of morality. We have not lost our culture; we are
ignoring it.
Cliff Chandler © Copyright
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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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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—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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Negro Digest / Black World
Browse all issues
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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 /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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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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ChickenBones Store
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update
14 January 2012
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