legacy and pragmatic application

LEGACY AND PRAGMATIC APPLICATION

"The youth of old age ordains finality/ the judicious  dessert of living."

Rumor is most dangerous in the Age of Trumposity.  "If the leaders of the industry that presides over our information and hopes to shape our future can't even concede the existence of reality," Franklin Foer wrote with razor-clean irony in the May 2018 issue of The Atlantic, "then we have little hope of salvaging it."  Irony notwithstanding, Foer is on point is arguing that in a future that is always a present "few individuals will have the time or perhaps the capacity to sort elaborate fabulation from truth" (18). Just listen to how American citizens talk at one another, using technologies that enable us to delude ourselves that we are well-informed about everything.  The surplus of information, especially in social media, stymies genuine thinking.  Perhaps our best option is to use our ancestral legacies to retard such flooding.  The task isn't easy, but it is doable.

The youth of old age intensifies my belief that we should push back against the dangerous nonsense of the twenty-first century in our nation and  resist erosions of humanity.  The ancestral legacy of Dr. Margaret Walker can serve us well. Thus, I vowed to speak briefly  about her ideas regarding history, life, and culture at the 12th annual Creative Arts Festival at Jackson State University (April 13, 2018).

I  remembered her insights about the necessity of incorporating Black Studies in the academy; her achievement in organizing the now legendary Phillis Wheatley Festival;  her prophetic vision in establishing a viable research institute at Jackson State University.  Her poetry ----the best of it ---is but one manifestation of how a creative mind works, of how it submits itself to a discipline of form as it pushes back against the trite, the trivial and the tragic which inhabit the domain of content.  The best of her poetic legacy may not be left to us as verse; it may be something much beyond  the powerful  lyric "For My People." Her legacy  may be ours to (re)cover and (re)sound from her journal entries, her letters, speeches  and essays, her conversations in interviews.  She cast down her bucket where she was and left us an institution that might prevail.  Her imperatives are not imprisoned in time.

When Margaret Walker wanted to know what needed to be known about history, she spent four decades in researching and writing the novel Jubilee.

When she wanted to find the meaning of her life and the lives of others , she experimented with combining science, social science, and humanities , combining the habits of mind that allow us to make provisional sense of things in This Is My Century.

When she wanted to inform us about the world class status of Richard Wright, she wrote Daemonic Genius, a generic intersection of biography and autobiography.

When she wanted to deal with culture(s), she focused on the always evolving and primal synthesis of African American cultures and on the dimensions of creative expressiveness that braids the political, the aesthetic, and the pragmatic in her signature poem "For My People."  She lectured about the essence of what must be known in the twenty-first century:

"For the most part our people have been gullible and believed the half-lies and the half-truths denying our blackness and wishfully affirming their whiteness by seeking to become carbon copies of white people.  But the fact remains that we are living in a multiracial world in which there are varying cultures, religious beliefs, and socioeconomic or political systems, and whether we like or dislike it, our children must be educated to live in such a world. They must learn to live in a world that is four-fifths colored, nine-tenths poor, and, in most cases, neither Christian in religion nor democratic in ideals."  [ From the essay "Religion, Poetry, and History: Foundations for a New Educational System," first published in Vital Speeches of the Day 34.24 (October 1, 1968) ].

 Fifty years ago, Margaret Walker knew what the Tribe of Trump in 2018 is helping people who believe they have no color recognize in the ambience of sorrow and the maximum dislocation of synthetic chaos.

Once when she and I were having a conversation about Richard Wright, she said in her unique voice that the most important thing about a writer is her or his ideas.  I (re) sound that bit of wisdom in my own devising of terms of engagement and in my cynical thinking about  how empty and ego-afflicted are our everyday conversations.

Using Margaret Walker's legacy in the service of pragmatic action is one option for resisting. It is not a sinecure.  It is not a solution for problems that evade solution.  It is merely a reasonable act of self-defense.  For those who would be teachers of one sort or another, reading Howard Rambsy II's mind-opening posts for Culturalfront.org and the daily blogs from the African American Intellectual History Society is useful. These sources provide ammunition.   It is common sense to accord no credibility to the reprehensible antics of televised "news," the fantasies that ebb and flow in print media, or the ubiquitous "magic" of the Internet.  Despite their unavoidable limits, cultural analytics and empirical aesthetics serve us well in the combat zones of being.  Let us remind ourselves and our children 24/7/365 that when Margaret Walker wrote in the final stanza of "For My People"

Let a new earth rise…Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear.  Let a race of men now rise and take control.

she was not addressing passengers in a ship of fools.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            April 22, 2018