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Books by Marvin X
Love and War: Poems /
In the Crazy House Called America /
Woman: Man's Best Friend /
Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality
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* * * * Marvin
X Offers A Healing Peek Into His Psyche
Review of
In the Crazy House Called America
By Junious
Ricardo Stanton
Rarely
is a brother secure and honest enough with himself to reveal his
innermost thoughts, emotions or his most hellacious life
experiences. For most men it would be a monumental feat just to
share/bare his soul with his closest friends but to do so to
perfect strangers would be unthinkable, unless he had gone
through the fires of life and emerged free of the dross that
tarnishes his soul. Marvin X, poet, playwright, author and
essayist does just that in a self-published book entitled
In the Crazy House Called America.
This
latest piece from Marvin X offers a peek into his soul and his
psyche. He lets the reader know he is hip to the rabid
oppression the West heaps upon people of color especially North
American Africans while at the same time revealing the knowledge
gleaned from his days as a student radical, black
nationalist revolutionary forger of the Black Arts Movement,
husband, father lover, a dogger of women did not spare him the
degradation and agony of descending into the abyss of crack
addiction, abusive and toxic
relationships and family tragedy.
Perhaps
because of the knowledge gained as a member of the Nation of
Islam, and his experiences as one of the prime movers of the
cultural revolution of the '60, the insights he shares
In the Crazy House Called America are all the keener. Marvin writes
candidly of his pain, bewilderment and depression of losing his
son to suicide. He shares in a very powerful way, his own out of
body helplessness as he wallowed in the dregs of an addiction
that threatened to destroy his soul and the mess his addictions
made of his life and relationships with those he loved.
But
he is not preachy and this is not an autobiography. He has
already been there and done that. In sharing his story and the
wisdom he has gleaned from his life experiences and looking at
the world through the eyes of an artist/healer, Marvin X serves
as a modern day shaman/juju man who in order to heal himself and
his people ventures into the spirit realm to confront the soul
devouring demons and mind pulverizing dragons; he is temporarily
possessed by them, heroically struggles to rebuke their power
before they destroy him; which enables him to return to this
realm, tell us what it is like, prove redemption is possible,
thereby empowering himself/ us and helping to heal us. He
touches on a myriad of topics as he raps and writes about
himself and current events.
Reading
this book you know he knows what it is like to come face
to face with and do battle with the insanity and death this
society has in store for all Africans. Marvin X
talks about his sexual relations/dysfunction, drugs, media and
free speech, sports, black political power or the lack thereof,
the war on drugs and the current War on Terrorism, nothing is
off limits. He includes reviews of music, theater as well as
film, but not as some smarter/ holier than thou, elitist
observer.
Marvin
X writes as one actively engaged in life, including its pain and
suffering. He lets us know he was a willing and active
participant in his addiction, how it impacted his decision
making, his role as a parent, his male-female
"relationships", his ability to be creative within a
movement to liberate African people and the world from the
corruption of Caucasian hegemony.
Marvin
X is in recovery and it has not been easy for him. As a
writer/healer he still has the voice of a revolutionary
poet/playwright, it is a voice we need to listen and pay
attention to. He has survived his own purgatory and emerged
stronger and more committed to life and saving his people.
As North American Africans (his term to differentiate us from
our continental and diasporic brethren) he sees the toll the
insanity of this culture takes on us. His culturally induced
self-destructive lifestyle choices and the death of his son is a
testament to how life threatening and lethal this society can
be.
But
Marvin X also talks about spiritual redemption, the ability to
transcend even the most horrific experiences with resiliency and
determination so that one gets a glimpse of one's own
divine potential. This book is an easy read which makes it all
the more profound. In The Crazy House Called America is
for brothers especially. It is a book all black men should grab
hold of and digest, if for no other reason than to experience
just how redemptively healing and liberating being honest can
be.
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In the Crazy House Called America
is available from Black
Bird Press, 3116 38th Ave., Suite 304, Oakland, CA 94619. Send
$19.95, plus
$5.00 for postage and handling.
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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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update 1 July 2008
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