Jerry Ward's Blogspot

WHAT WILL NOT STAY DEAD In rare instances, the first and the final sentences of a novel are a perfect frame for the narrative.   One might argue this is true for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man , and   in her third novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (New York: Scribner, 2017) Jesmyn Ward has   chosen her sentences well:   "I like to think I know what death is."……. Home , they say. Home . The distance between Ellison's history-invested narrative and Ward's experiential aesthetic is vast, in part because she writes within a tradition of African American women's fiction, within the tradition of Toni Morrison, Octavia Vernon,   and Gloria Naylor and in part because her themes emphasize dread, the death-oriented qualities of everyday life, poverty,   and the psychosexual risk of being Southern.   Her themes are troubling and   quintessentially American.   She exploited them powerfully in Where the Line Bleeds (2008) and Salvage the Bones (2011), and she re

    Ernest J. Gaines:   A Brief Appreciation "Gaines's responses to both black and white men's literary discourse are central to any theory of his fiction.   The novelist's pervasive concern with how men engage   fundamental questions surrounding personal, communal, and existential identity connects him as much to the legacy of Joyce and Faulkner as it does to Wright." Keith Clark, Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson , page 68. "The plantation and the prison both attempt to exercise disciplinary control over bodies as well as over spaces, and this connective tissue repeatedly figures into the constructions of black life, remembered and memorialized, in Gaines's novels. … These two help to shape what may be read in Gaines as a black spatial aesthetic and a model for valuing black existence in the rural South." Thadious M. Davis , Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, & Litera

FIT DESPAIR INTO THE DAY Morrison, Toni.   The Origin of Others .   Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Morrison's publishing her 1990 William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of Civilization as   Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) was an event , a moment of gravity in discussions of how a considerable amount of "white" literature masked as   American literature dealt with or sought to avoid dealing with Africanist presence in the United States of America.   Her analyses were razor-sharp, surgical.   They modeled qualities of literary critical thinking one wished to absorb and pass on to one's undergraduate and graduate students.   If one could succeed, to some degree, in transmitting Morrison's insights, one helped students ( as well as oneself) to be more securely grounded in what mattered about history and the need to have   more thorough understandings of literature as expressions of ideology and

THEORY OF JUSTICE/September 2017 We swim in the wake of ghosts, the guilt of slavers, the innocence of enslaved souls, swim in the histories of Harvey, Irma, Jose, Maria, in constitutions and social contracts rich with the packed cargoes of angry winds and contrite rains, all seeking in spirals of time geographies and new old spaces to disrupt, to   distract, to destroy with profits of sorrow, with pulse of greed. We swim in the wake of ghosts, in peaceful discontent with what nature knows---- heartbreak, revenge, the tagging of good and evil toes. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             September 22, 2017

New Orleans/French Quarter Black Mammies Candy-shop mammies of Royal Street grinning and obese command the entrances to praline-sweet chip-gip joints Watermelon lips and cotton boll eyes entice the gaze Severe black sheen of hands and face conjure dreams of ante-bellum day (for white girls on the prowl) "Mammies are a joke," the neo-massas say and slurp gumbo in the renovated Slave Exchange. They are a joke, but even candy-sweet (lawd, miss ann you sho nuff pretty) mammies know their human rites. Yesterday, my parraine, he tell me one candy-shop mammy she ungrin herself, yeah, and slashed a lily-white throat -- cajun-style It is a mystery of pure delight (and drums were heard in Congo Square) The Times-Picayune wrote this morning: New Orleans Shocked.     Mammies Got Hot Stuff In Them . Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             1977

THE MINDS OF BLACK FOLK We might not have a satisfying conversation with Dr. W. E. B. DuBois about the souls of black folk in New Orleans unless we first give some attention to their minds. "Let us now praise famous men," James Agee wrote," and our fathers that begat us.....Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore."   To push back against womanist protest, Agee's first sentence must be rewritten as "Let us now praise famous women and men, and our mothers and fathers that begat us."   The conversation can now commence. New Orleans University was chartered on March 22, 1873, a scant eight years after the end of the Civil War, and was located in the Garden District, fronting Coliseum Square.   There is reason to believe the women and men who attended New Orleans University in 1878-79 might have been intellectually superior to many HBCU graduates of 1978-79.   They were not admitted to NOU if they lacked "

GENDERS & GENRES (law's labor loses love) Middle passages of hurricanes--- death borne by birth in a poem elusive inconclusive --- enigma eternal. Retell, retail a lie into reliability. Muddle passages of hurricanes--- birth borne by death in a romance complicates duplicates--- enslavements internal. Fornicate a fib into a fable. "The theory of America let freedom prove no man's inalienable right!   Every one who can tyrannize, let her tyrannize to his satisfaction!" Distract distraction into denial. Muddle middle passages of hurricanes--- future drama of ancient rain trauma incarcerate a lie in perfect deniability. "The theory of America--- hurricanes let nothing remain upon the earth except the ashes." Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             September 14, 2017

WOODSHEDDING   When Lolis Eric Elie, the moderator for the mayoral forum on music and cultural policy (the Carver Theater, September 11), asked the candidates to focus on matters of policy, he might as well have asked an amoeba to become an equilateral triangle.   His admonition was less than effective, because the candidates were determined to woodshed.   Musicians woodshed or rehearse assiduously in order to hone their skills.   Politicians woodshed to sharpen their rhetorical skills and use them to secure votes.   Music is a vital feature in the traditions that give New Orleans a unique flavor.   In the current century, music is as much a part of business and tourism as it is a part of organic celebration.   There is the rub.   When music is linked with policy and governance, exploitation can thrive.    Knowing   that to be the case, most of the candidates used rhetorical appeals to avoid addressing directly how viciously policy can cooperate with corporate interests in explo

WHAT ARE VOTERS IN NEW ORLEANS SUPPOSED TO DO ON OCTOBER 14? Vote, of course.   Nevertheless, voting intelligently is no easy matter.   We have ideological convictions of some kind, and we want to support candidates who share our prejudices.   The candidates for mayor and city council seats express ideas about their intentions and priorities at forums.   What the candidates for State Treasurer,   Orleans Parish Coroner, and two judgeships --- Court of Appeal, 4th Circuit, 1st District, Division B and Civil District Court-- truly think is voiced only on their websites, in the campaign literature they and their supports distribute.   Although the Coroner need only have skill in forensic medicine and good vision and the Treasurer should assume financial policy is a sacred trust, judges must employ complex legal reasoning to make decisions.   It might be argued that there is less gravity in the duties assigned to a treasure or a coroner than in the duties we entrust to judges.   If

BLACK NEW ORLEANS TRICENTENNIAL: AN EXERCISE What did Africans who morphed into Creoles and African Americans do in a place named New Orleans between 1718/1719 and 2018? Between now and mid-2018, I shall explore that question by compiling an eclectic bibliographic essay and writing brief comments inspired by the entries for books and articles, by fragments of family stories and stories told to me by New Orleanians, by certain childhood memories of the Crescent City, and by a feeling that "official" narratives of three hundred years will repress some information that citizens and potential tourists should know.   I am collaborating with Kalamu ya Salaam on this project and anticipate that our individual contributions will overlap and differ in productive ways.   Our common aim is to create a document that might galvanize thinking among middle and high school students in a future. The essay will be indebted to such works as John W. Blassingame's Black

S.O.S.: LABOR DAY POEM Foxy spawns in the game, they digit post-truth for the lame, for ladies and lords of the burning-cross clans, for stupidities hatching fascist plans, damning the media of the changing same. Tweets shall neither night nor day cease within his tower's lid; he shall long live a thug forbid, working seven vices, nine times nine. They, three sisters hand in hand, trump ire, peppering water, salting land, thus do twerk, around, about, thrice to thine, and thrice to mine, and thrice again, to make up nine and anodize all reason out. Tweets shall neither night nor day cease within his power's grid; he shall survive and thrive a thug forbid, working seven vices, nine times nine. Paris coutured, Kremlin perfumed, they, none of human born, eclipse his mane, blonde-rinse his eyes, moon-dust and polish his horn, lightly catechism false fact lies, any old thing at any old rate to ma

WHAT ARE VOTERS IN NEW ORLEANS SUPPOSED TO DO ON OCTOBER 14? Vote, of course.   Nevertheless, voting intelligently is no easy matter.   We have ideological convictions of some kind, and we want to support candidates who share our prejudices.   The candidates for mayor and city council seats express ideas about their intentions and priorities at forums.   What the candidates for State Treasurer,   Orleans Parish Coroner, and two judgeships --- Court of Appeal, 4th Circuit, 1st District, Division B and Civil District Court-- truly think is voiced only on their websites, in the campaign literature they and their supports distribute.   Although the Coroner need only have skill in forensic medicine and good vision and the Treasurer should assume financial policy is a sacred trust, judges must employ complex legal reasoning to make decisions.   It might be argued that there is less gravity in the duties assigned to a treasure or a coroner than in the duties we entrust to judges.   If we