Jerry Ward's Blogspot

The American Messiah 2018 Discomfort ye, discomfort ye My people saith the godly ghost; saith the consecrated host; cause ye discord eternal; and grunt unto it, that genocide is accomplished, that holocaust is rejected, and cry unto it warfare is anointed, that its iniquity is unctuous, is death-light pardoned. The brazen trumpet sweeps in wilderness: concludes chaos with flowers of evil so damned, so medieval. Confirm chaos: make crooked canticle in space, in time,   warp for the godly ghost. Discord shall cheapen in the people's minds. And petrify the daughters and sons of Gogmagog in middle gassings of virgin witches in sugar ditches, in middle passing of windbag wigs of wheat, of   brain burned in paradise. Discomfort ye, discomfort ye My people saith the godly ghost; saith the consecrated host. For unto them a Beast is born, unto them a vengeful thing is given, and the government shall be e

Ramcat Reads #18 Alexander, Patrick Elliot. From Slave Ship to Supermax: Mass Incarceration, Prisoner Abuse, and the New Neo-Slave Novel .   Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018.   Although Alexander does not reference Abdul R. JanMohamed's The Death-Bound-Subject (2005), his book continues in a new key what JanMohamed addressed regarding   the formation of black subjectivity.   His readings of the carceral aesthetic in works by Baldwin, Morrison, Charles Johnson, and Gaines are path-breaking examinations of what Sheila Smith McKoy calls "a continuum of state-sanctioned control over the black body."   This book may inspire us to take up the challenge Dominique DuBois Gilliard leaves us with in Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores ( Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2018) ---the challenge of "setting the captives free, spiritually liberating them and emancipating them from a depraved system that defaces the imago Dei&quo

JAMES BALDWIN: six questions/six responses November 28, 2018 University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh 1.              What would be your comments to this Baldwin statement if it was directed to all Black males, "Our crowns have been bought and paid for....All we have to do is put them on our heads."   What impact would this message also have on how they view themselves? My first response is to ask if the purchased crowns are made of thorns and barbed wire or of precious metals, and my second reaction is to ask what is the actual or symbolic meaning of wearing a crown.   Where is the fascination with an object associated with royalty/aristocracy coming from?   And was Baldwin sending forth an allusion to Christianity? It is impossible to say how "all Black males" would receive the statement, and it simply will not do to speak in generalities that lack confirming data.   As an African American male, I am not the least interested in putting a c

LITERACY AS A TOOL TO COMBAT INCARCERATION Each mouth can liberate its own story . One of the adult prisoners at Orleans Justice Center (OJC) whom I'd been helping to prepare to take the HiSet Exam in order to earn his high school equivalency certification handed me an essay entitled "Alone."   It was not a required assignment.   He wrote the piece as a way of dealing with his experience of   trauma.   It was an excellent first draft,   and I urged him to submit it to Peauxdunque Review . The editors loved it, and it will be published in a forthcoming issue.   A gifted writer, the prisoner used   literacy as a tool   to combat the agony of incarceration. He used literacy and creative thought to tell his unique story and   deepen   awareness of why "incarceration" is as much a mental state as a physical one. Awed by his unbridled honesty, his courage and bravery,   I wrote a kwansaba for him: ALONE (a kwansaba for Prisoner # _

Hell-bent Notes on WTF in the USA PARADISE IS HELL; HELL, PARADISE. When you ask should writers do more to encourage rejection   of talking about American culture and political affairs within the exclusive limits of what is black and what is white, you are asking a question that is at once accusatory and presumptive.   You presume that people who call themselves writers ought to have significant opinions about how Americans talk among   themselves and about others in 2018.   You presume that writing has impact on literacy and literature, that writers have more investment than have non-writers in the benefits and dangers of speech acts.   Your presumption is anchored more than a little in your research and writing on the life and works of Richard Wright, but it is dreadfully and fatally located in your belief that many contemporary writers pander to their egos and do not give a tinker's damn about much other than broadcasting their personal suffering.   Please note that

NAOMI Naomi, you are sweet, smart, sugar eternally spilling from a jewel-cut crystal and honey to improve the universe. Naomi, you are a splendid gift, a truth-telling mirror, a sublime presence to bless this bitter earth. Naomi, we look at your face and into your secure brilliance, your genius, and grow wiser, stronger, and always new, always a bit more immune and able to prevail against the surprising troubles of the world.

Think Thoughts Thinking "Think," she sang out of the black fire of 1968, the smoldering year, "what you're trying to do to me. You better think…" and we thought, out of vernacular pride under skin, over bone and blood, our minds on vacation in assassinated dreams on the freeways of love, our mouths contradicting our teeth so finely chewing the lotus of revolutions that our eyes would not see what was on the ground when a natural woman sang in a man's world. Me was not she but we. And the histories we failed to think into   with diligence of ice fried our minds and   our hair. Death begets new valuation, regrets, perhaps, that our ears did now and then misconstrue the genius art of her voice spun on iconic turntables as   the "quiet-as-its-kept" sound/waves carried her power, her iterations of ain't no way but to do right in the house that God built

DO YOU HEAR AMERICA SPEAKING? In an online letter of November 7, 2018, Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, proclaimed: "America spoke powerfully last night   --- rejecting the hate and lies of President Trump and delivering a forceful rebuke to his white nationalist agenda. Not only did we see a shift in the balance of power in Congress, but record turnout, a sign that voter enthusiasm is high. And it was a historic night in other ways as well." These assertions are excellent bits of liberal propaganda.   The third sentence approaches a truth; the first and second meander toward nonsense and hyperbole and a fiction of desire.   Were the assertions expressed from a conservative perspective,   they would propose that America confirmed how judicious is President Trump's nationalist agenda and pardoned his erratic application of conservative principles. Conservative propaganda would assure readers that a "shift i