Third World Again

A recent project around the work of writer Toni Cade Bambara has me thinking about the resurrection of a dormant usage of the term Third World.

As members of American black liberation movements in the 1960s and 70s used it, the term “Third World” unified the experiences of people of color within the United Sates with the experiences of oppressed people worldwide.

There are lots of examples of its usage in this way. A notable–and lasting–one is the name poet Haki Madhubuti gave to the publishing house he founded in 1967, Third World Press.  There’s a point in his autobiography where he hits on the power of this idea, though he is talking specifically about the personal impact reading Richard Wright had on him. He says:

“Wright pushed my young mind into a world where less than eight percent of the world’s population rule as if the majority of the world’s Asians, Africans, poor Europeans and other non-whites existed only for their benefit.” (pp 182-3)

Anyone of my generation who spent time in the Arab World and hung out with people his or her own age might have gotten the general gist that our counterparts had something of a raw deal, and seemingly few avenues for a real future. It was not altogether unsurprising that the situation would come to a head, though no one could have set a date in advance. But until recently, it has been far less easy to publicly acknowledge that we youth in the West suffer from the very same factors–veiled, as they have been, by the seductive jargon of the ‘free’ world, by which we are encouraged to think of ourselves as the most advantaged people on earth, and enlisted as unwitting agents not only in the oppression of people in far-away lands, but in our very own oppression.

Absorbing the reaction of US media to the “Arab Spring,” I became concerned that too few of us were able to connect the lives we lead here–that, to give only one example, the demand for the oil I myself consume in everything from plastic corrective lenses I poke into my eyeballs everyday to the car I use to transport myself,  leads to the inevitable rise of rulers who are more concerned with siphoning their resources to meet the demands of the West than the well-being of their subjects.

But the guilt is the comforting part. Perhaps because that’s the part that resigns us to feeling powerless. Anyway, this song by the late Gil Scott-Heron says what I mean:

The fullest potential of this ethos remains untapped, though leaders like Muammar Gaddafi have served as fascinatingly nightmare-ish warnings against proceeding too naievely, or with too much lust for power.

I’ll confess something. There are times when I get to feeling that there is no ‘them,’ not really (if we’ve learned nothing else, it’s that “their” numbers are few and fewer,  though it seems that they are mighty). The horrors of the modern predicament we are untangling ourselves from are everywhere: in us, out there.  And now what?

Meanwhile, in Another Part of Town

A couple quick links to some book reviews I’ve done reccently for Paste. Caveat: as internet reading fare goes, these are on the longer and more intense side of the spectrum.

Of Karen Russell’s Swamplandia…

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2011/06/swamplandia-by-karen-russell.html

Of Tayari Jones’ Silver Sparrow…

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2011/07/silver-sparrow-by-tayari-jones.html

 

Song of the South

A few days ago I read this beauty right here. And responded thus. Which got my wheels to turning.

After a Cream- and Led Zeppelin-listening binge for a couple weeks last month–il faut, friends, il faut–and after subsequently bringing it back home by listening some of the artists whose songs they covered , I got to thinking about a certain miracle embodied by the rise of British Blues-Pop in the 1960s and ’70s, as well as by mainstream American Rock n Roll. I’m talking about the miracle by which the words of poor black men and women of the Southern United States ended up in the throats of the unlikeliest folks from all over the world.

When I hear an Englishman like Eric Clapton singing in the accent of a sharecropper from Mississippi, I don’t necessarily see it as mimicry, though I realize by turns that it can be taken that way. It can also be seen as someone using the best language that has been provided him to express a certain human pathos. Mainstream American rock n roll, and everything influenced by it, has come to involve people very far removed from the experience that created the accent in which they’re singing. Without exception, singers of what’s been named “soul music” around the world–Amy Winehouse, Adele, and Joss Stone being the most recent British incarnations of the phenomenon–find it necessary to adopt a Southern American accent, and usually African-American dialect, even in order to sing their own original songs in that style. It’s really something to take a silent moment to ponder. There are of course grave issues of plunder and exploitation to be explored, but here I want to take time to see it from a different angle.

Why have blues and hip hop offered the world this particularly well-resounding language? I can only begin to know, but I suspect it has to do with the unique turning point to which the world has been arriving; that we now find ourselves having to synthesize ancient memory with modern experience, before the road becomes a dead end.

Many Latin American writers, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, mention Fualkner as a key influence. It has a lot do with the South’s experience of itself not only as tropical but as marginal. This is also an important reason why the foundational elements of a US pop culture that has been shaped into the first front of our global imperialsm could only have been forged in the American South. The South of the United States is a crucial resevoir for humanity. It has been not only a place where much of the violence on which our culture depends could be committed out of the center’s sight, like some slaughterhouse on the outskirts of town, but a place where a vibrant pastoral human culture could flourish in ways that are deeply silenced elsewhere in the country–ways resonant with much of human life outside this country . The South is of America, but does not share a full portion of that privilege.  Pure economics illustrate that to this day.

It’s equally important to remember that before the rise of Southern hip hop, American hip hop artists from every part of the country found themselves rapping with a New York accent. Because New York had forged the art form, it was necessary adopt their language in order to use it whether you were from California or DC. Although I know there has been an international aspect to hip hop from the beginning–can’t forget an essential Carribbean element present both in its early performers and their sounds–I would argue that it was only after artists began to stretch the syllables of rap out into a southern drawl that it could begin to find root outside of the Western Hemisphere (its first and third worlds) and the “developed” world abroad, to become a form that artists could use, with heartfelt authenticity, to reach for power that had been systematically denied them. Groups like Outkast told mainstream hip hop: “We are outside the center, but have made rap our own.” It’s provided an important model for artists around the world do so.

My feeling today is that South is that from which we all come and to which we are all returning. It’s as true within the US as anywhere.

Death of a Narrative

The real victory is not that the man is dead, but that his power over us had already been broken. His power over those of us in the first world was so great that we’ve been willing to sacrifice much of the freedom–and even wealth–that is so vital to our vanity on the world stage in fear of him. His power over those who practiced his religion, or lived in his region, was so great that he could be used to further justify the actions of dictators, who claimed to be acting dutifully, squelching imagined danger, by keeping their populations in poverty and terror.

Until this January in Tunisia. And this February in Egypt. And this moment, right now, everywhere . I was watching Mubarek fall from Vermont, where I did a residency–watching snow fall with my heart so full for folks. We were watching from everywhere.

Let’s not forget who really killed Bin Laden.  Once the youth he fraudulently claimed to represent had done their work, there was no use further use for the myth of him, here or there.

I don’t know that I’m saying anything that no one has heard before. I only want to be sure that we are recognizing this moment for what it is: the symbolic end of a narrative that has been used to keep all of us, on either side of the (fictive) East-West dichotmoy, less free.

I also offer, below for your viewing pleasure, Wael Ghanim’s  speech on the occasion of making the Time 100.  This is the computer engineer who began the “We are All Khaled Said”page on facebook, with historical implications. He gives this speech in English (the Arabic subtitles are a bonus for the interested), and, despite his humble disclaimer, quite eloquently so. He so powerfully captures the feeling of having been wounded by the story on the Arabs as it has been told by those in power, and the victory of having subverted it.

Morse Code

I came across this fictional telegram from the 1940s the other day:

DEAR MA. PLEASE TELEGRAPH THIRTY DOLLARS. WANT TO COME HOME. AM FINE. EVERYTHING OK. JOHN.”

–from William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, Chapter Three

It had me thinking about Twitter, text messages, the way language changes, and the panic that inevitably ensues over what, it is feared, will be lost. It’s nice to know that a couple centuries after technology first forced people into compacting the lettered text of their ideas so bluntly for the sake of speedy communication–the telegraph was in wide use by the mid 1800s–we are still as interested in using text towards its most elaborate, most eloquent capacities, as we are in finding new ways to break its rules, and to jar it awake, and to force it jam-packed with concise meaning. Long live long and short forms.

Translations

In pretty typical fashion, I can’t give my two cents on all the hullabaloo over  the New South’s recent edition of Huck Finn without taking a long, winding, meandering way to the point

So ‘ll start like this: half a millennium after the invention of movable type, we take it absolutely for granted that the particular arrangement of printed letters in a word is more than a representation of a sound, but something real in itself.  Something that there’s a right and a wrong way to do, a standard way and deviants.

Never mind that all oral languages are dynamic, even ones with a written counterpart. In the age of the internet forum and the text message, we’re forced to confront illusion that even printed language can ever be fixed. Spell-check be damned; now that text and type are so ubiquitous–now that the power to arrange type is held in the very palms of very young hands, via their mobile devices–not only the arrangement of letters in words, but the meaning of words, shifts more quickly than it’s ever been able to before in a literate society.  And here we find ourselves, scrapping over whether the literal text of a perennial classic can be tampered with.

One thing that much of the outrage over the “white-washing” of Huck Finn’s language misses is that Mark Twain’s original is still widely available.  And I think it will be until its language is no longer intelligible to the reading public, or until there is no more reading public to speak of. This is the most important thing to keep in mind: that the new edition exists alongside many other editions, the vast majority of which are entirely faithful to the original text.

You can pick your flavor, but I just can’t help but to see it as a valuable thing for there to be the possibility of variety. Because I see it, also, as a question of translation. If any of the millions of world readers who take their printed word in a language other than English have had the benefit of enjoying Mark Twain, they’ve done so using texts that were forced to abandon some of the author’s essential sensibilities, rendering his aesthetics as best they could given an entirely new context.  What Chinese character roughly translates to: “person whose brown skin renders him less of a person”?

As an object, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has long ago joined the ranks of objects like the King James Bible–texts with whom most English speakers who have inherited certain ways of thinking about themselves are passingly familiar without ever having actually read, whose presence on the shelf of a household is meant to signify a certain amount of basic cultural literacy or legitimacy.  King James’s version of the Good Book, itself a translation, has since been further translated–into other versions of the English language–many times over.

And there’s a similar usefulnesss in re-translating another canonical English text to a new social context. I’m in total agreement with the oft-stated persepctive that the issue with the use of the word “nigger” in the book is America’s deep discomfort with itself and refusal to confront the truths that it operates on. As a fan of words, I’d also never deny  that the fascinating word at issue still has great usefulness, relevance, and yes, at times even merit. So you won’t find me on any “Ban the N-Word” wagon.

But there are no complaints when someone like Flaubert is re-translated into English. That’s of course because the re-translation is a new rendering of an original text that is itself inaccessible to the English-reading public. But consider that an English-language text like Huck Finn, so often banned in its own country, so often the subject of controversy in the classroom (just because there’s a child in it doesn’t mean it’s for children), and (let’s dare to be really honest here) having, at its heart, a social dynamic so particular to the uniquely American interpretation of race that it certainly confounds readers who haven’t grown up with our society’s assumptions–is in fact inaccessible, in its original form, to many readers in the context of our 21st century global culture, especially young ones. And surely the man whose seer’s scry was so spot-on that he imagined, correctly, that we’d still be interested enough in his work one hundred years after his death for him to release his autobiography at that time to wide reception could forgive us for finding new ways to keep his most beloved classic socially accessible.

Vive la difference is all I can say.

Oriented

Which way is east? Some thoughts on the orient:

“Not long after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the victors often reiterated the assertion that Africa begins at the Pyrennes. Others have said the Orient begins at Paris.”

–Carter G. Woodson, from “Attitudes of the Iberian Penninsula”

“…For had it not been for peppercorns, then what is ending now in East and West might never have begun. Pepper it was that brought Vasco de Gama’s tall ships across the ocean, from Lisbon’s Tower of Belem to the Malabar Coast…so that in the period called Discovery-of-India–but how could we be discovered when we were not covered before–we were ‘not so much sub-continent as sub-condiment,’ as my distinguished mother had it.”

–Salman Rushdie, from The Moor’s Last Sigh

“The west shall shake the east awake, while ye have night for morn.”

–James Joyce, from Finnegan’s Wake

Not much else to report. I am ardent in the attempt to say things the right way, the best way. Sometimes that means you wait a long while for the words,  humbled by all that lies out of their reach.

Desert/Blues; & Other Lessons in Parallel

My loved one, who hails from that land, thought it was Moroccan music playing when he walked in during the middle of the Max Roach song named, appropriately, All Africa.  Class, please take your YouTube player to the 4:00 mark of the clip below.  And play to the end.

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If you’ve done that, then play this video next from the beginning. I’m told that the name of this rhythm from Marrakech is, straightforwardly enough, Dakka Marrokchia.

Pretty eerie parallel.  Wonder if Roach was as unaware of the connection as I.  Somehow I doubt it. Extra credit: play the first clip from the beginning and be stirred by the voice of Abbey Lincoln, whose spirit so reccently crossed to the other side.

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Two more parallels for the grab bag.

Now and then I’ll discover a blues lyric–for one of my generation the discovery is backwards, not forwards–that parallels almost exactly, dang near word for word, a hip hop lyric. Maybe more on that in the future, but something to start with:

“I don’t care what your mama said. I don’t care what your father said. As long as you love me.” –from “Shake it Baby,” by John Lee Hooker

“Don’t want to meet your mama. Just want to make you come-a. Don’t want to meet your daddy. Just want you in my caddy.” –from “Hey Ya,” by Outkast

Lastly:

“Two nations of the same original stock, with language and customs differing but little, mutually hated each other.”  –from “Attitudes of the Iberian Peninsula,” by Carter G. Woodson

He’s talking about Spain and Portugal during the Age of Exploration, but it seemed to me that it could just have easily have been written about Israel-Palestine. Here I should at least give a nod to that eye-roll worthy article that appeared in the BBC earlier this month, where it was implied, with suspicious motives, that Arabic and Hebrew–both Semetic, both written right to left, and with such overlap in vocabulary and pronunciation that they easily sound the same to a lazy or untrained ear–actually require different parts of the brain. Hebrew being aligned, of course, with the rational, “left-brained” West.  Suuure.

Rhythm is immortal, folks.

Equinox

“What’s a Negro? I don’t know what a Negro is. What’s a Negro–a black person? How black? What’s a Negro? A person living in a two-room shack with 12 kids? A lot of white people live in a two-room shack with 12 kids. Does this make them Negro? What’s a Negro–someone with African blood? A lot of white people have African blood.”

–Bob Dylan from an unpublished interview, as found in Positively 4th Street

It’s a good time of year to think about borders between identities, as the boundary between night and day balances. I’ve been writing to the blues lately, and thus lead to think about the first half of the twentieth century, another equinox, and the ways we saw things then.  Trains and Jesus and whiskey and women. This was before most of us were carried far enough away from the land to lose our awe for the sacred. It was before most of us were human beings in the eyes of the law.

When I hear some of these old songs about trains and radio it reminds me of hip-hop.  Both treat our landscape, mechanical and electric as it’s become, like it’s as natural as stone or sky. The materials of the electric world–old records that get recycled into samples, and the concrete topography of the city itself–become raw, pliant, elemental.  The walls again alive with drawings.  McLuhan will tell you this, that we are making primitive use of the modern world’s materials, that we are returning to something lost millennia ago.  That we are the primitives of the future (I need to remember where that phrase comes from), though I’m sometimes worried by the implication that this makes us less than human.

But sometimes “primitive” can be code for “human.” As opposed to whatever else we may be becoming.

Great American

I held off for a minute articulating an opinion on the latest cover of Time, not only because I’ve no doubt Mr. Franzen is a fine writer but also because I’m quite sure that my opinion among the thousands of others on that matter, in my humble no-name hermitage in the South, weighs very little.  But he’s coming to my neck of the woods soon, which gives one further reason to chew on the issue.  And I don’t quite want to say it, because my Daddy would have told you three years ago–and I’d have agreed–that he would not live to see a black president, but I wonder if we can imagine that a woman of any race (these ladies sufficiently laid the subject to rest) or anybody outside the white one could ever be called, no matter the prowess of his or her pen, Great American.

So I’m realizing that what troubles me in his recent designation as “Great American Writer” is not the well-warranted word “great,” but the word “American.”

We all know that this is one of those terms–a lot like any word ending in -ist or -ism, and much like the word “freedom” itself, upon which Franzen’s new novel meditates–that a lot of people and groups of people play tug of war over, in the contest to determine exactly who has the right to use the word.

I’m not saying that nothing beautiful has ever been or can ever be written from the perspective of Franzen’s work, only that it’s past time for us to find a more definite qualifier than “American” to describe the white upper-middle class experience. Though it’s one to which we’ve all been taught to aspire, it is in fact the experience of a minority, class and race considered. There are actually poor white Americans. Come to Georgia, I invite you.  And there are actually–annoying fact, I know, and it pains me as much as you to continue to hammer it in–plenty of Americans who aren’t white.

There’s also this suspicion: how can the fact that Franzen is the newest laureate to be crowned “Great American Writer” have nothing to do with his other claim to casual household notoriety in America–here I use the word as it’s best and most precisely used, to designate a certain geographical expanse–which is to say, his noble wresting of his Great American reputation away from that sorceress, the Negress Oprah Winfrey? Who is no small threat to Great Americanism, with her billions of dollars and her firm hold on the minds of moneyed and marginalized women everywhere? By taking the stance that had Oprah withdraw him from her Book Club–for what reason again? He didn’t want to be read by women? or considered one who wrote for women?  Dilemmas of Great American Privilege, I assure you–he placed himself squarely in opposition to any changing of the Great American guard form its usual sentinels. And joined a far more distinguished club than Oprah’s, it seems.

I won’t take time to voice my personal qualms with his”rules” of fiction writing, recently published online, or the ways that these rules fit into the same extremely masculinist ideals for the writer as the Time article’s designation.  I just want to quote  a comment the illustrious, wise, and very jazzy Opal Moore left for this blog ages ago, in reference to Toni Morrison:

The interviewer wanted to know when TM would write a novel that was substantially about white people, something in the mainstream of literature. Toni Morrison said, in a bit of pique, that the interviewer did not realize how racist her question was. She said, ‘It never would occur to you that maybe I AM the mainstream.’

Great Chronicler of the White Middle Class Experience, Whose Recognition as Great is Particularly Predicated on his own Maleness. Can we just leave it at that? It’s not his fault, either, and it shouldn’t take away from the rightful recognition of his work as worthy and interesting and beautiful.  It’s only a matter of what pedestals upon which we, America, place him.