Interrogation


Cinematic Interrogation





Accidents of opportunity have made this a week of self-interrogation.



Monday, October 22 ---"Cane River" (1982) forced you to meditate on your color and blood-talk documented Creole ancestry



Friday, October 26 --"Dry" (2014) invited you to think about vesicovaginal fistula in Nigeria and what many African Americans quite too easily trivialize and romanticize about their print-documented ancestry



Accidents of chance have made this a week of reflection and refraction.



Do you want to holler, to make sounds no one shall hear?  Do you want to take a vow of silence, to expose uncertainty to the multi-angled,  ironic gazes of the disinterested world in which you live? Triage isn't exactly an easy task, is it?



ii





It is enough ( necessary and sufficient )  to say that cinema is a tool for witnessing.  For awkward confession.  What follows the visual ending of a film is the advent of torment.  Universal and impersonal torment.  Filmmakers beware.



What you plant can grow crookedly or straight in the soil of the mind.





iii



Look carefully at the flowers of evil which bloomed after viewing these two films.



(1) The orchid of despair -----benign genocide shall not disappear until systemic racism dies.



(2)  The rose of hope  ----after one thousand seasons (years) the continent of Africa shall reunite the above-Saharan and the sub-Saharan and come to its senses.  At that time, Europe and the Americas shall be wastelands and Asia shall be the  frontier of last resort for humanity.



Accidents of chance have made this a week for crafting burial urns.





Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            October 27, 2018








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Christmas, Kwanzaa, 2018

Blog 12.19.2017 CHRISTMAS I have a reason for not being anxious to celebrate Advent and Christmas Day.   Sixty years ago, my father died on December 25.   Fifty-nine years ago, my favorite uncle died a few days before Christmas.   I do want other people to be happy, but I am most at peace when Christmas has gone with the snow, the sunshine or rain, the wind.   I still say "Merry Christmas."   The only genuine happiness I experience, however, is listening to Handel's "The Messiah" and a few songs I've treasured since childhood,   attending Midnight Mass, having home-made fruitcake   after Mass, and eating a special meal with relatives on the excessively commercialized holiday. KWANZAA Umoja ---Decide with whom you should seek unity. Kujichagulia --Expand the terms of engagement for 2018. Ujima ---Cooperate on a project with people you can trust. Ujamaa --Be frugal.   Shop selectively. Nia ---Remember ou...
Read more

implacable violence, part one

Implacable Violence, Part One The death of Senator John McCain quickens our   interest in how to deal with contemporary   narratives of life history.   McCain's touchstone story pertains to American conservative values, the consequences of trauma,   military and public service, violence, and   a sense of honor.   Barack Obama's differently remarkable narratives direct attention to the absence of military service, class and caste violence, the audacity of hope, centralist values, and diversity in the history of "race."   Narratives about McCain and Obama stand in noteworthy contrast to future narratives about Donald Trump, stories that may place ego in the foreground as they unfold tales of sexism, constipated values,     inadvertent racism, the violence of capitalism, sleight of mouth, and avoidance of military service.   Ego, self-fashioning, and boldness are apparent in the three sets of narrative, but excess lynches the Trump set...
Read more

DuBois and Black Reconstruction

  PROPAGATION OF HISTORY AND FAITH   DuBois, W. E. B.   Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 . (1935; New York: The Free Press, 1998).   Dr. DuBois knew what was problematic about his revisionist history in Black Reconstruction .   He made his intentions clear in his note "To The Reader" (December 1934).   His ideal audience consisted of people who believed a black person in America "and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beings…"   DuBois was not trying to convince those who regarded " the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation, who can never successfully take part in modern civilization…"   Indeed, the Negro, in my mind at least, is the chief architect of civilization.   Is it only a matter of accident that Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro was published   two years before Black Reconstruction ?   No.   It wasn't an accide...
Read more