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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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* * * * Nature
and Spirituality
By
Marvin X
Morning
sun, Ra ascending, beam of light, truth. Air still.
Ancient trees, rolling hills. Bird symphony. Cry of wild
turkeys. Cows graze. Lizard inside my funky shoes
outside door. Now he's a funky lizard. Lizard inside my
house. I put him out but he finds his way inside each
day as if he lives there. Snake slithers into tall
grass. Geese head north following leader.
If you
turn off the music you might hear the birds. Let the
birds sing bye bye black bird. Turn off the music.
Listen to the bird god.
When
Negroes come to the country they bring the beat from the
city. boom boom boom. boom boom boom. the urban jungle
beat. boom boom boom. Negro say kill the lizard, kill
the bee kill the fly kill the bird kill the mosquito
kill the turtle. boom boom boom. boom boom boom. Negro
can't be still enjoy nature, nature's God as Sun Ra used
to say. Cannot connect with trees, mountains, creek,
rivers. Negro not at peace. Cannot appreciate stars in
the night, moon, Jupiter. Negro must have beat, jungle
beat, boom boom boom, boom boom boom. Too quiet he
moans. Let there be noise. Boom boom boom. Kill the cow,
kill turkey, kill deer. Boom boom boom. One cow says to
another, "Why don't they return to their city where they
kill each other?" Boom boom boom.
Go down to
the creek, talk to the water, listen to the water, be
still. Listen to water crossing stones, water crossing
weeds, listen. Let water fill your ears, water moves
forward gushing forth, pure water.
Look up at
the Hawk gliding smooth, no wings moving, still, gliding
high low, stops still in sky. Move like a hawk. I am
hawk, searching for prey. Chief bird of the air,
controlling ground traffic, bird of grandeur, king of
sky.
Look at
God everyday. The tall pines, silent, still for a
thousand years. God speaks loud and clear, except to
deaf dumb and blind, crazy with saviors and messiahs
whose message they will not heed in a thousand years.
Can they fool God? The fool fools himself.
Pious
pronouncements, wicked actions. Cannot be still, cannot
stand tall like pine. Cannot bend in the wind.
Something
is strange today. There are no birds, strange silence.
No birds, no Hawk gliding. Can life be without birds,
their constant song. How can one get up without birds.
Is morning to be no more. What world is this, the world
money bought. The world for the material boy and girl.
Where are the birds?
I am in
the garden. The garden is in me. Here comes the
butterfly. What happened to the butterfly this year. Did
man kill the butterfly. Why kill Bill. Don't you see all
of nature gathers around you in the name of love. The
flowers come to you in the name of love. Even the weeds
are golden, full of beauty, full of love.
Look, all
is still like the first morning of the world. I write
naked on a bench. Squirrels watch me watching them.
Source:
Toward Radical Spirituality, Black Bird Press,
2007 (c) 2006 by Marvin X (El Muhajir)
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* * * *
Marvin X has given permission to
Harvard University to publish his poem "For El Haji
Rasul Taifa" from Love and War: Poems by Marvin X
(1995). The poem will appear in The Encyclopedia of
Islam in America Volume II, Greenwood Press, edited
by Dr. Jocelyne Cesari of Harvard's Islam in the West
Program. Mr. X is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology
Muslim American Literature, University of
Arkansas Press, edited by Dr. Mojah Khaf. He is also in
the forthcoming Muslim American Drama, Temple
University.
posted 19 June 2006
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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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
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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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