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Books by Jerry W. Ward Jr.
Trouble the Water
(1997) /
Black Southern Voices (1992) /
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008) /
The Katrina Papers
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The Katrina
Papers
Reckoning with
Displacement
By Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
December 6, 2005: Reckoning with
Displacement
People are possessed by hope, sensing at once
its promise and its futility. One hopes to resolves economic
difficulties by winning several million dollars. The probability
that one can warp from poverty to wealth overnight is farfetched
, a transparent fantasy. One might hope that tribesmen, dusted
by Islam, would honor the Words of Allah and not murder , in the
name of honor, women they believe have been violated . It is
unlikely such virtue can unsettle the male-defined tribal mind.
One does not discard root and branch an idea that has been
growing since the invention of antiquity. In the fervent mind of
the tribesmen, the hymen must be either intact or totipotent.
When such brave Muslim women as Serap Cileli
(We’re Your Daughters, Not Your Honor) and Necla Kelek
(The Foreign Bride) expose mortal sins, we may hope the
lesson is not lost on Euroamerian wife-abusers. Hope on. The
words of those who dissent, who transgress the pseudo-sacred,
receive scant attention. Their words are hangnails to be clipped
and discarded. Nevertheless, in our brave new world of
electronic possibilities, hope refuses to die. It is brash and
determined and survival-oriented. It lives.
One might hope that ordinary civilians would
not become the collateral damage of warfare, knowing even in the
moment of hoping that the God of War is blind and thirsty,
incapable of discriminating the blood of the innocent from the
wine of the guilty. Hope is absurd.
Strangely, it is within the hopeless confines
of the absurd that one hopes to find meaning in exile, in the
diaspora occasioned by Hurricane Katrina.
From the vantage of a writer, the lack of a
good library, or the pain of not having one’s dearly loved
books at hand, is a bittersweet blessing. The writer in exile
recalls that other writers have sometimes volunteered to exile
themselves in artist and writer colonies. This places exile in
arguable perspective. The disadvantages of forced exile, you can
freely lie to yourself, are sweeter and yield higher dividends.
Matthew Arnold thought sweetness and light were primal
ingredients of the civilized mind. He was dead wrong. The truly
civilized mind is a product of recurring darkness. It can not
flourish where the dirt is not as saturated with bitter toxins
like the soil of post-Katrina New Orleans. Examine the fabulous
textures of writers exiled from the Crescent City for evidence.
Or explore the weavings of writers who have returned to the Big
Easy to create in the moldy stench, in an "exile" from
the normal.
The writer in exile becomes a rabbit. She or
he navigates the briar patch of memory. The rabbit does not
forget convoluted paths, the tracks of reading and witnessing
that have become matters of instinct. The rabbit remembers the
lettuce of the King James Bible and munches on the carrots of
expanding canons. Emersonian self-reliance increases tenfold and
enables the rabbit to explore geographies of imagination. There
critical foxes do not run you down and snap your neck. There you
are immune to the intimidation of the book, to its power to
batter you with exactness. You hop blissfully over alien
terrain. The rabbit remembers what is most worth remembering.
Exile forces the writer to live outside the box,
to be remote from textual or referential certitude. The writer
has hope that odd combinations in a new context do work.
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End of the Year Letter
Vicksburg, Mississippi
December 11, 2005
Dear Friends,
This year has been one of serious decisions.
Natural disasters have made us aware of things we might wish had
remained hidden and dormant. We had to choose what is so
important about our being in this world that we shall elect to
have it govern the remainder of our lives. The fact of
breathing, at least for me, is now an existential phenomenon. It
is necessary to segregate what is actual from what is merely
real. As the year ends in holiday moods of sound, benign
insanity, and color, I think 2005 has much improved our visions
of the world.
Hope stands nude in its brilliant absurdity.
Charity is water that evaporates rapidly. Faith is a mosquito
that sings celestial hymns in the ear. Love has not changed its
character; it exercises its enormous powers with impunity.
Stupidity has exhibited itself to be the denial that slavery,
genocide, colonialism and imperialism; self-hatred and
ethnic-hate; fascism and sexism; class struggles, diseases, and
racism; capitalist tyranny and pseudo-socialism in the guise of
globalization, and plain old evil retard human efforts to be
civilized and dignified. The idea of virtue can not be conceived
without a disturbing reference to permanent conflicts among
human beings. Like the figures on a famous urn, the princes of
peace are involved in an eternal battle with the gods of war.
The much overrated inventions named goodness, truth, and beauty
are toys for children. It is not a bad thing if some of us opt
to become children again. 2005 made the whole planet very adult.
Do not be surprised to find that 2005 altered
some facets of my personality, that 2005 has handed me a surplus
of issues to carry into 2006. I refuse to burden you with a
catalog of post-Katrina complaints. It is sufficient that you
know I did experience some moments of joy during 2005. The
unexpected and reaffirming kindness of friends and strangers
prevented my walking through the mirror of death into the
unknowable. I will return to New Orleans in January to resume my
work at Dillard University and my research projects. I will
continue to share excerpts from THE KATRINA PAPERS, a journal of
my visions and epiphanies, with you. Meanwhile, I wish that you
and your families will have abundant happiness and peace during
the holiday season and thereafter. And finally I want to say
thanks for being there when I needed you most.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
4311 Commons Circle
Vicksburg, MS 39180
(601) 883-9926
The Katrina Papers is not your
average memoir. It is a fusion of many kinds of
writing, including intellectual autobiography,
personal narrative, political/cultural analysis,
spiritual journal, literary history, and poetry.
Though it is the record of one man's experience of
Hurricane Katrina, it is a record that is fully a
part of his life and work as a scholar, political
activist, and professor.
The Katrina Papers provides space not only for the traumatic events but
also for ruminations on authors such as Richard
Wright and theorists like Deleuze and Guattarri. The
result is a complex though thoroughly accessible
book. The struggle with form—the search for a
medium proper to the complex social, personal, and
political ramifications of an event unprecedented in
this scholar's life and in American social history—lies at the very heart of
The Katrina Papers . It
depicts an enigmatic and multi-stranded world view
which takes the local as its nexus for understanding
the global. It resists the temptation to simplify
or clarify when simplification and clarification are
not possible. Ward's narrative is, at times, very
direct, but he always refuses to simplify the
complex emotional and spiritual volatility of the
process and the historical moment that he is
witnessing. The end result is an honesty that is
both pedagogical and inspiring.—Hank Lazer
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What
We Need to Revisit this [2010] Katrina Anniversary
The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery
By Dr. Jerry Ward, Jr.
Published by UNO Press (2007) / ISBN: 0972814337
/ 233 pgs, paperback
Cover Art: Herbert Kearney
This journal begins on Sept. 2, 2005 and ends August
29, 2006 containing a year of the author's
struggles, defeats, and triumphs in the face of the
destruction of his city and home. In a larger and
more poignant sense, Dr. Ward tackles the
destruction of one's faith in the face of disaster,
a faith beyond the borders of religious ideals, it's
a simple faith in the way that the world should
work, in the way that the day should hold its shape.
There are so many beautiful insights, so many
heartbreaking truths laid bare on the page. The
journal is a gumbo, a composite of the professor in
his academic world, a man breaking bread with his
friend, an African American responding to the coded
speak of those who hold forth in the recovery of New
Orleans.
Dr. Ward pours
it all in: the suffocating days exiled in the
shelter, the catalogue of things lost to water, the
anger, the depression, the weight of trying to move
forward into the next actual entry in the journal's
progression. In there as well lies the keen eye
poised on literature and what it teaches us; Dr.
Ward shares peer reviews, colleague emails, letters
of recommendations and advice to young teachers. His
schedule to appear and speak, to grant interviews
and to be present civically in this tumultuous year
is admirable and exhausting. There is a return again
and again to the body, its need to slow down, and
the mind, which cannot sit still long enough to let
the sorrow seep in.
Dr. Ward tends
to his "post-Katrina" heart in the journal, aware of
the tenuous thread anchoring him to the city and to
the life he can lead within its recovery. He
responds with the poet's declaration: "I elect . . .
to exploit language and my own emotions" (38). This
will be difficult to read if you were here, if you
too have a post-Katrina heart. You will feel it in
your skin, be it color or non colored, the prickly
anxiety and fear that shadowed that first year back.
You will be
forced to recall the smells of your moldy
possessions, the loss of your home, the sounds of
the empty streets, the joy of each returning
business and neighbor, the frustration of insurance
contacts and FEMA paperwork, the endless lines, and
the falling asleep truly not knowing what the next
day would bring. You will be taking a strange boat
like the one on the cover, "all mothers are boats,"
is its name, and you will be rowing toward an island
where we keep these things tucked away for they
never truly leave us.
The mother in
this case is your city, your survival; she weeps for
you even as she turns her back. "The perpetual
wonderment of tragedy is that we do not tire of
looking into its fractured surface to see ourselves
as we really are" (150).
Source:
Solid Quarter
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The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008)
is a marvelous resource! It's not like any
encyclopedia I've seen before. Already, I have spent hours reading
through the various entries. So much is there: people, themes,
issues, events, bibliographies, etc., related to Wright. Yours is a
monumental contribution! The more I read Wright (and about him), the
more I am amazed at the depth and breadth of his work and its impact
on the worlds of literature, philosophy, politics, sociology,
history, psychology, etc. He was formidable!
Floyd W. Hayes
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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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A Wreath for Emmett Till
By Marilyn Nelson; Illustrated by
Philippe Lardy
This memorial to
the lynched teen is in the Homeric
tradition of poet-as-historian. It is a
heroic crown of sonnets in Petrarchan
rhyme scheme and, as such, is quite
formal not only in form but in language.
There are 15 poems in the cycle, the
last line of one being the first line of
the next, and each of the first lines
makes up the entirety of the 15th. This
chosen formality brings distance and
reflection to readers, but also calls
attention to the horrifically ugly
events. The language is highly
figurative in one sonnet, cruelly
graphic in the next. The illustrations
echo the representative nature of the
poetry, using images from nature and
taking advantage of the emotional
quality of color. There is an
introduction by the author, a page about
Emmett Till, and literary and poetical
footnotes to the sonnets. The artist
also gives detailed reasoning behind his
choices. This underpinning information
makes this a full experience, eminently
teachable from several aspects,
including historical and literary—School
Library Journal |
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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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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest / Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
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
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
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posted 13 December 2005 / update 16
January 2012
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