Books by Kalamu ya Salaam

The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement  /   360: A Revolution of Black Poets

Everywhere Is Someplace Else: A Literary Anthology  /  From A Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets

Our Music Is No Accident   /  What Is Life: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self

My Story My Song (CD)

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Books by James Cone

God of the Oppressed  / A Black Theology of Liberation  / For My People, Black Theology and the Black Church

Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (1992)  / Black Theology and Black Power

Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of  Liberation, 1968-1998   /  The Spiritual and the Blues: An Interpretation

Black Theology: A Documentary History: Volume Two: 1980-1992  /  My Soul Looks Back

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Interview with Award Winning Neo-Griot

Kalamu ya Salaam

6

Christianity & Other Religions

Rudy: If you can say all writing is "inherently" political, couldn’t you say with equal thrust that all writing is "inherently" religious? Let me return again to Malcolm My Son. It is the best piece of dramatic writing that I have read in some time.

In that play you speak of the supernatural. Are you religious? Do you have faith in the Judeo-Christian God? Clearly, you are a very spiritual person. For you seem to have some "insight into the unseen."

Kalamu: I am a non-theocentric spiritualist. I do not believe in a god or gods, as "god" is commonly conceived. I have no faith in organized religion of any sort, denomination or nomenclature. I will quote

In a piece of science fiction I wrote, one of the characters addresses that question. God is "I don’t know." The human identification of "God" is another way of saying I don’t know albeit putting some certainty and substance to one’s ignorance. As brother   Curtis Mayfield said, everybody needs something to believe in. Most of us can not imagine facing the void without a faith in something beyond what we know.

Personally, I don’t feel a need to understand everything. I can accept that there are mysteries, that there are aspects of life that are not only unknown, but are indeed unknowable. In fact, you want to know the truth, most Christians have the same belief system I do, it’s just that they put "God" between themselves and the mystery. They make god knowable and then turn around and tell you that we humans are not able to understand god.

So, when they say "God knows," that’s just another way of saying, I don’t know. I don’t feel a need to have god as a middleperson between me and my ignorance. There are things I don’t know—god or no god. And no amount of my belief in a "god" is going to enlighten me or make me any less ignorant on issues beyond the scope of human understanding.

Rudy: I quite sympathize with your position on our religious situation. I too was baptized at twelve at my family church, which has been the same foundation for 132 years--a foundation laid by freedmen For me also, it was prophesied by my great grandfather that I'd become a preacher-- which has given me much pause. I too left the church when I was in high school and have not been much of a churchgoer since.

I have also flirted with a Marxian perspective and other religions. I have, however, never been able entirely to reject the faith of my Virginia ancestors. Among whom I would include Nathaniel Turner of Southampton. Thus it is unclear to me whether you are rejecting fully the religious faith of our Christian slave ancestors or whether you are rejecting the church as presently constituted. If the former, does not that constitute a kind of disrespect of these ancestors? 

Kalamu: Was it "disrespect" of their non-Christian ancestors for those of our people who were first enslaved to convert to Christianity? When Kunta became Toby, when they turned Shango into Jesus, was that disrespect of the ancestors? Don't ever forget we did not start out as Christians. I accept that Christianity is a legitimate religion and a legitimate choice for some of us to make. But I don't respect any kind of Christian chauvinism that attempts to browbeat people into accepting the inevitability of the whole world converting to Christianity. 

Moreover, Nat Turner was not the only person to actively fight for freedom. The fact that Turner was a Christian in no way legitimizes Christianity for me. Why is it so hard for Christians to accept non-Christians without trying to convert them, without trying to make it seem like anyone who chooses not to become a Christian after receiving the "word of God" is a heathen? The truth is, I am honoring all of my ancestors who refused to embrace the White man's god. Period. 

Rudy:  Your interview with Edward Kamau Brathwaite and your response to him on the question of religion is extremely interesting and provocative. Brathwaite concerned himself with Carribbean culture and its religious connection. He concluded: "With the African person the religion is the center of the culture; therefore, every artist, at some stage, must become rootedly involved in a religious complexity." He goes on further to make a distinction in how European theologians have dealt with God and how our ancestors have dealt with divinity in our everyday lives. 

In your response, you seemed troubled by Brathwaite's position on the role and importance of church religion in our cultural life. You seem to believe our African gods and the Christian God failed us. Maybe our African gods failed us. Neither Turner nor King nor my 91-year-old grandmother would agree with you on the failings of Christ in the lives of African-Americans. They and many like them would say that our Lord has brought us a mighty long way. 

Kalamu: I am not going to argue with anyone's beliefs. I have stated my position. I am not troubled by anyone believing something different from what I believe. I questioned, in the larger philosophical sense, how Christianity in general and how Black Christians specifically deal with the question of what did we do to deserve enslavement. If the Christian God is a just God, what wrong were we guilty of to deserve the holocaust of chattel slavery? If we did no wrong, that is, if we were not collectively guilty then why were we punished? If the answer is that it is a mystery and is something beyond the ability of humans to understand, I can live with that. However, that answer implies that we can not use the principle of God being just to explain our situation.

Rudy: It seems as if you have set up a type of duality or conflict between the blues/jazz world and the church/religious world. I know that sort of thing is out there. But in practice they seem to inform the other. Wouldn't it be better to view the two worlds tied at the waist, so to speak? 

Kalamu: Tied at the waist may be true in a meta-philosophical sense, i.e. taking a cultural look at the ways of Black folk, but on a day to day basis, a blues lifestyle is not the same as a Christian lifestyle nor is a blues lifestyle generally acceptable to Christians. You know that and I know that. In fact, the Baptist church is known for its vigorous damning of blues music. Moreover, this is not something I set up, rather the differences between the camps is something I recognize, not something I created. This difference does not mean that some overlap does not exist or that there is no one in either camp that understands and embraces the other. 

Obviously there are numerous examples of blues singers who also sang gospel, and vice versa in the case of Rev. Gary Davis. And of course you had jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington and especially John Coltrane who recorded religious music. Plus, there are people such as the theologian Rev. Cone [Dialogue on Black Theology] who wrote a book on the subject of the blues and religion. But the example of those folk is an abnormality, a deviation form the norm. 

In general, blues/jazz and the traditional Christian church are separate, and too often, conflicting camps. I might also add: contradictions and controversy do not bother me. I don't feel a need for everyone to agree in order for us to live and work together, or in order for us to love one another.

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