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The Revolutionary Theatre should force change, it should be
change. (All their faces turned into the lights and you work on
them black nigger magic, and cleanse them at having seen the
ugliness and if the beautiful see themselves, they will love
themselves.) We are preaching virtue again, but by that to mean
NOW, what seems the most constructive uses of the word.
The Revolutionary Theatre must EXPOSE! Show up the insides of
these humans, look into black skulls. Because they have been
trained to hate. The Revolutionary Theatre must hate them for
hating. For presuming with their technology to deny the
supremacy of the Spirit. They will all die because of this.
The Revolutionary Theatre must teach them their deaths. It must
crack their faces open to the mad cries of the poor. It must
teach them about silence and the truths lodged there. It must
kill any God anyone names except Common Sense. The Revolutionary
Theatre should flush the fags and murders out of Lincoln's face.
It should stagger through our universe correcting, insulting,
preaching, spitting craziness . . . but a craziness taught to us
in our most rational moments. People must be taught to trust
true scientists (knowers, diggers, oddballs) and that the
holiness of life is the constant possibility of widening the
consciousness. And they must be incited to strike back against any
agency that attempts to prevent this widening.
The Revolutionary Theatre must Accuse and Attack anything that
can be accused and attacked. It must Accuse and Attack because
it is a theatre of Victims. It looks at the sky with the
victims' eyes, and moves the victims to look at the strength in
their minds and their bodies.
Clay, in Dutchman, Ray, in The Toilet, Walker in The
Slave are all victims. In the Western sense they could be
heroes. But the Revolutionary Theatre, even if it is Western,
must be anti-Western. It must show horrible coming attractions
of The Crumbling of The West. Even as Artaud designed The
Conquest of Mexico, so we must design The Conquest of White Eye,
and show the missionaries and wiggly Liberals dying under blasts
of concrete. For sound effects, wild screams of joy, from all
the peoples of the world.
The Revolutionary Theatre must take dreams and give them a
reality. It must isolate the ritual and historical cycles of
reality. But it must be food for all these who need food, and
daring propaganda for the beauty of the Human Mind. But it is a
political theatre, a weapon to help in the slaughter of these
dimwitted fat-bellied white guys who somehow believe that the
rest of the world is here for them to slobber on.
This should be a theatre of World Spirit. Where the spirit can
be shown to be the most competent force in the world. Force.
Spirit. Feeling. The language will be anybody's, but tightened
by the poet's backbone. And even the language must show what the
facts are in this consciousness epic, what's happening. We will
talk about the world, and the preciseness with which we are able
to summon the world, will be our art. Art is method. And art,
"like any ashtray or senator" remains in the world.
Wittgenstein said ethics and aesthetics are one. I believe this.
So the Broadway theatre is a theatre of reaction whose ethics
like its aesthetics reflects the spiritual values of this unholy
society, which sends young crackers all over the world blowing
off colored peoples heads. (In some of these flippy southern
towns they even shoot up the immigrants' Favorite Son, be it
Michael Schwerner or J.F. Kennedy.)
The Revolutionary Theatre is shaped by the world, and moves to
reshape the world, using as its force the natural force and
perpetual vibrations of the mind in the world. We are history
and desire, what we are, and what any experience can make us.
It is a social theatre, but all theatre is social theatre. But
we will change the drawing rooms into places where real things
can be said about a real world, or into smoky rooms where the
destruction of Washington can be plotted. The Revolutionary
Theatre must function like an incendiary pencil planted in
Curtis Lemay's cap. So that when the final curtain goes down
brains are splattered over the seats and the floor, and bleeding
nuns must wire SOS's to Belgians with gold teeth.
Our theatre will show victims so that their brothers in the
audience will be better able to understand that they are the
brothers of victims, and that they themselves are victims, if
they are blood brothers. And what we show must cause the blood
to rush, so that pre-revolutionary temperaments will be bathed
in this blood, and it will cause their deepest souls to move,
and they find themselves tensed and clenched, even ready to die,
at what the soul has been taught. We will scream and cry,
murder, run through the streets in agony, if it means some soul
will be moved, moved to actual life understanding of what the
world is, and what it ought to be. We are preaching virtue and
feeling, and a natural sense of the self in the world. All men
live in the world, and the world ought to be a place for them to
live.
What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic,
magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores
all data, and can be called on to solve all our
"problems." The imagination is the projection of
ourselves past our sense of ourselves as "things."
Imagination (image) is all possibility, because from the image,
the initial circumscribed energy, and use (idea) is possible.
And so begins that image's use in the world. Possibility is what
moves us.
The popular white man's theatre like the popular white man's
novel shows tired white lives, and the problems of eating white
sugar, or else it herds bigcaboosed blondes onto huge stages in
rhinestones and makes believe they are dancing or singing. WHITE
BUSINESSMEN OF THE WORLD, DO YOU WANT TO SEE PEOPLE REALLY
DANCING AND SINGING??? ALL OF YOU GO UP IN HARLEM AND GET
YOURSELF KILLED. THERE WILL BE DANCING AND SINGING, THEN, FOR
REAL! (In The Slave, Walker Vessels, the black
revolutionary, wears an armband, which is the insignia of the
attacking army . . . a big redlipped minstrel, grinning like
crazy.)
The liberal white man's objection to the theatre of the
revolution (if he is "hip" enough) will be on
aesthetic grounds. Most white Western artists do not need to be
"political," since usually, whether they know it or
not, they are in complete sympathy with the most repressive
social forces in the world today. There are more junior birdmen
fascists running around the West today disguised as Artists than
there are disguised as fascists. (But then, that word, Fascist,
and with it, Fascism, has been made obsolete by the word
America, and Americanism. The American Artist usually turns out
to be just a super-Bourgeois, because, finally, all he has to
show for his sojourn through the world is "better
taste" than the Bourgeois . . . many times not even that.
Americans will hate the revolutionary theatre because it will be
out to destroy them and whatever they believe is real. American
cops will try to close the theatres where such nakedness of the
human spirit is paraded. American producers will say the
revolutionary plays are filth, usually because they will treat
human life as if it was actually happening. American directors
will say that the white guys in the plays are too abstract and
cowardly ("don't get me wrong . . . I mean aesthetically .
. .") and they will be right.
The force we want is of twenty million spooks storming America
with furious cries and unstoppable weapons. We want actual
explosions and actual brutality; AN EPOCH IS CRUMBLING
and we must give it the space and hugeness of its actual demise.
The Revolutionary Theatre, which is now peopled with victims,
will soon begin to be peopled with new kinds of heroes . . . not
the weak Hamlets debating whether or not they are ready to die
for what's on their minds, but men and women (and minds) digging
out from under a thousand years of "high art" and
weak-faced dalliance.
We
must make an art that will function as to call down the actual
wrath of world spirit. We are witchdoctors, and assassins, but
we will open a place for the true scientists to expand our
consciousness. This is a theatre of assault. The play that will
split the heavens for us will be called THE DESTRUCTION OF
AMERICA. The heroes will be Crazy Horse, Denmark Vesey,
Patrice Lumumba, but not history, not memory, not sad
sentimental groping for a warmth in our despair; these will be
new men, new heroes, and their enemies most of you who are
reading this.
Source: Liberator, July, 1965, pp. 4-6
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This essay is true today as it was when first
published in Black Dialogue magazine forty years ago. The essay
defines the aesthetics of revolutionary black theatre that has
all but disappeared in the dust of reactionary times, times of
betrayal and loose lips that sink ships. The times require that
we consider what we said and what we did and did not do. Until
we do the right thing, Sun Ra taught, we can't go forward or
backward. So having not done the right thing, here we are today,
stuck on stupid, like super glue on our asses, looking for a way
out of our morass. Maybe this little essay will offer some
light.
Hope to see you all at the Black Radical
Book Fair, San Francisco, January 30-31,2004. For more
information, call me at 510-798-9155. --Marvin X
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American Creation
Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding
of the Republic
By Joseph J. Ellis
This subtle,
brilliant examination of the period
between the War of Independence and the
Louisiana Purchase puts Pulitzer-winner
Ellis (Founding
Brothers)
among the finest of America's narrative
historians. Six stories, each centering
on a significant creative achievement or
failure, combine to portray often flawed
men and their efforts to lay the
republic's foundation. Set against the
extraordinary establishment of the most
liberal nation-state in the history of
Western Civilization... in the most
extensive and richly endowed plot of
ground on the planet are the terrible
costs of victory, including the
perpetuation of slavery and the cruel
oppression of Native Americans. Ellis
blames the founders' failures on their
decision to opt for an evolutionary
revolution, not a risky severance with
tradition (as would happen, murderously,
in France, which necessitated
compromises, like retaining slavery).
Despite the injustices and brutalities
that resulted, Ellis argues, this
deferral strategy was a profound insight
rooted in a realistic appraisal of how
enduring social change best happens.
Ellis's lucid, illuminating and ironic
prose will make this a holiday season
hit.—
Publishers Weekly /
American Creation (Joseph Ellis
interview) |
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) |
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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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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
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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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