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When They Flooded New Orleans
By Rudolph Lewis
We did nothing, but wept
in our air-conditioned rooms
while our folks sweated
all their fears. All in our heads
ain't it funky, ain't it funky?
After it all, blood & death
the underbelly of black life unfolds
on tv, in journals, in head scarves
wheelchair & stroller . . .
ain't it funky, ain't it funky?
An American, a neighbor
begs for a bottle of water
up to his knees in water
tissue paper, diapers & milk.
Baggy pants toss aside indignities
& raid a market . . .
ain't it funky, ain't it funky?
for his woman &
her babies—gangsters
& drug dealers
they don’t just sit or bend over
they won't be punked . . .
ain't it funky, ain't it funky?
& do nothing—
we all addicted to
love & respect, we
wring our hands; stars yet shine
ain't it funky, ain't it funky?
There's ghetto in soap dramas
& the
struggle.
Life was sweet before the floods
came
we tell our children . . . they smile
ain't it funky, ain't it funky, now? |
posted 27 November 2005
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Responses
Yes,
just like reality t. v., except this was LIFE.—Miriam
Nice poem Rudy- have you
heard this song about N.O.? http://www.hurricanesong.com—Kam
yeah, the brother gets a lot out of that one
page. I think I like Legendary KO's George
Bush Doesn't Care. It's far less sentimental, pathetic.
KO's work carries force and power, attitude and action. His is
the spunky voice of the poor. Our work's got to be fully
charged, capable of moving mountains, should be greater in
capacity and courage than bone-shearing bullets. KO does
this.
I ain't no poet, lyricist--but I'm trying to do what so
many are not doing, what I think poets and writers should
be doing in these times, to see and move people to action,
rather than pity and excuses. Maybe that's too much to ask of a
poem or a song or of poets and writers. Some may call it social
realism, propaganda. Art has a social utility, in any event.
I'm quite amazed by the invective and satire of Ibo
journalists. They cut up power elites like razors the
flesh, or Muhammad Ali's left jabs, looking good and staying
within the rules, at the same time. Check out A
Mother Like Stella Obasanjo and Baroness Lynda Chalker.
We could learn a lot from them in dealing with our
power elites, artfully. But we still into Jet and Ebony celebration
of individual accomplishments. We need to liberate that praise
mode.
We still counting rocks and square feet, the brightness of
glamour, living vicariously, while the people go to hell in a
hand basket. We must take our stand outside of the
status quo—Rudy
No one
ever accused me of handling black elites with kid gloves. I've
challenged Mike Tyson to a fight and ripped everybody to Condi
to Colin Powell to Michael Jackson, see my latest attached.—Kam
You certainly trash MJ. But it seems to me
he's an easy mark, now. He's on a downhill slide. What you
expose is a lot of personal garbage of the socially ill. The Ibo
journalist chose persons that could really threaten him, even
have him killed. Maybe "power elites" rather than
"black celebrity elites," on their way down, is what
I'm getting at.
The Ibo journalist is a tightrope walker, staying
just within the rules of free speech. He criticizes the
President's deceased wife of corruption, only a month after her
death. That's real balls, it seems to me, ain't afraid to lose
them kind of attitude—Rudy
How about my calling for Bush's impeachment
before his first inauguration?—Kam
How about ragging continually the
incompetence and lap-doggishness of the Congressional Black
Caucus (CBC), black mayors, black state politicians that work
against livable wages and dignity for the poor? Forget
about their personal habits. How about black demagogues that
sell out to union czars and corporate corruption? How about
black intellectuals who spend most of their time teaching rich
white kids, and ain't got no time for the poor? There are many
targets you could choose that might put you in real danger.
Let's not join the frenzy. There's more to do than be cute.
The call for impeachment is provocative, but it's
not programmatic. I'd prefer you call for the impeachment of the
CBC, its dissolution, as a waste of taxpayer money.—Rudy * * *
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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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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
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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