NUBIAN RUINS

PUTTING "WHO" OVER WHAT

PUTTING "WHO" OVER WHAT It mattered more that the work be done, than it be known who did it. This selfless view of labor placed the focus upon product not producer. By virtue of this view the pyramids were built and civilizations founded. This view fell victim to vanity in later ages, inverting the primal paradigm. The focus then had flipped from what was done to who had done it. Man came to adore property, one's own private property, particularly. Focused on private property, "who over what," man's values declined. Mankind sunk to the point that it claimed other humans as property. Rather than just "holding all things common," another religion arose. Acquisitive kinds of religion arose, proclaiming this, but practicing that. Publishing one thing, but secretly propagating its doctrinal converse. It mattered more who was being paid, than what work was being done. "Who over what" in the present age, explains what went wrong and why. Explains what is wrong: it is vanity, vanity, all is vanity: values and laws.

TALE OF TWO "KILROYS"

TALE OF TWO "KILROYS" Kilroy does not confine himself to bathroom walls and to lascivious banter, Kilroy also desecrates the walls of ancient caves and iconic monuments with discursive waste. Dr. Kilroy might even clean up his language and his allusions, don a lab coat, get a big grant and storied staff, and then lie about his subject matter profligately for enjoyment. As between the two Kilroys, the one less dangerous is the scrawling one, he who writes down a phone number "for a good time" or who writes something nasty on the wall! The other one has perverted our study of science, history, theology, anthropology, mathematics, etc.

BLACK PEOPLE KILLED BY POLICE IN AMERICA

It is very strange to me that the number of black people killed cumulatively and individually by police departments every year in America is not a defined statistical category maintained by either the Department of Justice or some other agency that is accessible to the public. Such vital information should not have to be independently and privately compiled from responses to information requests to 25 police departments, that was recently issued by the National Bar Association, in the wake of the Ferguson, Missouri, disturbances following the murder of Michael Brown. If such information were available, there would be no need for the National Bar Association's request. That it is not available is itself suspicious, if not sinister, and institutionally insidiously racist! Given the national fetish with record keeping, number-crunching, and endless numerical streams covering all kinds of minutiae, why this one glaring omission would remain vacant can only bespeak political calculation!

THE COLORED GREEN TREE

THE COLORED GREEN TREE by Larry Delano Coleman (Amazon.com/ Kindle (c) 2011) This novellette, by retired Kansas City attorney and A.M.E. Pastor, Larry Delano Coleman, examines an all-too-familiar sight in black America, “sagging pants.” So, too, were collard greens at one time an all-too-familiar sight and smell in black America! He uses collard greens, which he puns as “colored greens,” that most nutritiously potent of vegetables, as the basis of an extended analogy in his short, but powerful ,7500-word, easily-read, first novellette. The 24-page book analogizes the evolution of “saggin',” that defiant/nihilistic fashion statement, and those who “sag,” to collard greens, that have yellowed, and now 'sag.' This vegetable's sagging creates a crisis in the green grocers industry, in the black community, and among the genomes of the collard greens themselves. They all separately convene in search for a cause and for a cure for 'sagging.' Gene transfers from the humans that harvest and grow the greens to the young greens themselves, due to the mystery of epigenetics, is suspected as the cause. Happily, a cure is found for sagging, and a remedy for the dietary/nutritional/cultural/spiritual deficiencies that caused it! Along the way, a short genetic and cultural history of collard greens is given. Current cultural commentary, some of it unfavorable, is made by Tiger Woods and Fuzzy Zeller controversy, NBC television's black history month hullaballou, and by dietary snobs of all races. More favorably for this maligned vegetable, however, an Annual Collard Greens Festival that is held each year in North Carolina is highlighted. Likewise, the State of South Carolina, where collard greens are the official state vegetable, is lifted up. Southern blacks and whites still enjoy this nutritious food. Epigenetics, the study of the environmental impacts on intergenerational genetic transfers, has been validated earlier this year by geneticists and molecular biologists. That boosts this book's cogency. #30

"We" and "Us" Reconsidered

"We" is an involuntary term imposed upon "us" that is largely inaccurate and distorting. It implies more than it defines, requiring the tacit approval and acquiescence of the putative group member. Maybe terms like "we" and "us" should be explicated when used. Language laxity and imprecision is a divisive tool, used by demagogues and self-interested's to advance themselves.

BLAKE or THE HUTS OF AMERICA, a novel : book review

BLAKE or THE HUTS OF AMERICA, a novel

(Beacon Press, Boston, under auspices of Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, introduction by Floyd J. Miller, Editor: 1970)

By Dr. Martin R. Delany

Book Review—

By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman

Saturday, July 28, 2012

This pre-Civil War novel by the free-born, iconic black physician, explorer, abolitionist, editor, Union Army Major, and expatriate, Martin R. Delany, describes the incognito, transcontinental intrigues and escapades of a peripatetic, fugitive slave, who is the sole organizer of a much-anticipated slave revolt in the American South and in Cuba, a much-coveted Spanish slaveholding island colony. 

This was the first novel by a black person to be published in the history of the United States! That is a rare distinction by itself, apart from its literary merits, which are considerable!

Sweeping in scope, it takes place on land and on sea, in Africa, Canada, Cuba, and the U.S.  Published originally in serial fashion in the weekly newspaper, The Anglo-African, in 1859, it is reputed to be the black man’s reply to Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose 1852 novel, is said to have contributed to the Civil War. Stowe’s book, which personified slavery in human terms to the “North” through its melodramatic, empathetic characters, one of whom, “Uncle Tom,” is yet ingrained—though incorrectly and derisively -- in the black, national subconscious as a demeaning sycophant. Her book was based upon the earlier autobiography of A.M.E. preacher, runaway ex-slave, and Canadian emigrant, Josiah Henson, whose The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself (1849), served as the template for Stowe’s bestselling novel, which even President Abraham Lincoln is claimed to have read and to have praised.

A detailed introduction by Floyd J. Miller, Editor, written in 1970, issues a clarion call for the missing, final, six chapters of Blake, yet to be found, perhaps irretrievably lost. “Henry Blake,” is the Anglicized surname of the Cuban-born protagonist, “Carolus Henrico Blacus,” the scion of a well-to-do black Cuban tobacco merchant, who was impressed into slavery, during his apprenticeship as a seaman. This footnoted novel provides a compelling background narrative of Delany’s own life in its fictionalized aspiration for Pan-African liberation, as it tracks his own travels, readings, and life experiences.

Editor Miller piquantly opines, “[A]lthough an author of some ability, Delany clearly subordinated his writing to his own ideological orientation, and consequently his only fictional effort marks the artistic epitome of a social and political position—that is, the creative offering of an activist rather than the political expressions of an artist... [I]t is this nationalist bent throughout his career which gave Delany a prominence among blacks exceeded by few Afro-Americans in his generation.” P.xiii

Delany’s “activism” also manifests itself in scholarship, as his book, The Principia of Ethnology  was published in 1879. The brazen use of the word, “Principia,” alone, evokes Sir Isaac Newton’s 1687 physics and mathematical classic, Principia, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy:  a very lofty comparative to deign to attain for any man at any time of any color. Clearly, Delany was no ordinary man!

Nor is his an ordinary book. Part 1 describes slave life in the United States and Canada, including a harrowing chase, re-capture and escape via the underground railroad, cross-country, into Canada.  Part 2 deals with life at sea, in Cuba, and in Africa, including color distinctions and differences between Spanish and American enslavement. The hinge of the book is its compelling, detailed account of the process of enslavement from the African barracoons— coastal barracks/prisons—through the fetid, weeks-long trans-Atlantic voyage—the “Middle Passage.” It also portrays the ensuing sale in the Americas of the “fortunate” survivors, our ancestors, and their amazing adaptive and coping mechanism rooted in the religion and faith that produced us!

In that regard, Delany writes: “You must make your religion subserve your interests, as your oppressors do theirs!” advised Henry. “They use the scriptures to make you submit, by preaching to you the texts of ‘obedience to your masters’ and ‘standing still to see the salvation,’ and we must now begin to understand the Bible so as to make it of interest to us….Dat’s gospel talk,” sanctioned Andy. P.41 Throughout the work, spiritual allusions are ubiquitous, try as he might to distance himself from its overwhelming, centripetal force.

He also addresses the power and importance of having money, which is so essential to obtaining and securing one’s freedom.  He describes blacks who betray blacks, and whites who aid blacks.  African ship pilots, he points out, were the norm in African coastal waters and in slave ports like South Carolina. He recounts tales of Prophet Nat Turner’s “Dismal Swamp” devotees who cling to the hope of insurrection and freedom, and he makes reference to Dred Scott and James Somerset, conflicting Anglo-American judicial decisions which rejected black freedom in America in 1857and after it was initiated in Great Britain in 1772. 

That conflict was surely the real cause of the so-called “American Revolution,” slavery of blacks, as the British Royal Navy enforced the judicial ban on the African slave trade on the open sea and off the West African coast, after 1808, which embargo, American slave privateers, including the one Henry Blake piloted, repeatedly sought to subvert. All these and many other fascinating things are described most interestingly in the book. Of especial moment are the “seclusions” those covert insurrection planning meetings all across the country conducted across the South and in Cuba.

Whatever Delany’s actual ending may have been to his novel, “the African Freedom War” came, in the guise and form of the American Civil War and continues to this day “to secure these rights” which originate in the Magna Carta.

The work is memorable, indeed, unforgettable, and is commended to all as a true classic, worthy of its name.

#30