meditation on dread (first installment)


 meditation on dread (first installment)

Seeking clarification, a friend asked "Why do you call what you are saying about dread a meditation?"  I tell him I'm trying to express my reflections in contemplation on a critical issue that is at the core of my subjectivity.  The Latinate words may obscure more than they reveal.  In 2019, many Americans distrust words that are not Anglo-Saxon or Germanic  in origin. They can, should they so choose,  trust the  word "dread."



My dread is grounded in my gut responses to "Native Son Sundance 2019 World Premiere Q&Q"---https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pChHoyaWRo --to the comments on the film  "Native Son" (2019)  by Rashid Johnson (the director), Suzan-Lori Parks (the screenwriter) and Ashton Sanders  who plays the role of  the 21st century Bigger Thomas.  This is my partial summary of comments-----

·         Adapting a classic novel is complicated

·         Richard Wright provided an opportunity to tell a story about race, class, a young man's existential journey

·         philosophical concerns stand in contrast to telling a story

·         we lack the tools to have a conversation about the recurrence of Bigger Thomas

·         Bigger is an outsider; what cultural tools would he use to express who he is

·         Punk is radical music that has some parallels with hip-hop as radical music

·         21st century Bigger gets into trouble when he begins to play by the rules ---to get a job, to be friends with Mary Dalton ---friends share drugs

·         21st century Bigger does not kill his girlfriend Bessie; he would not  be sufficiently complicated and sympathetic simultaneously if the film allowed such violence against women to hijack his character

·         Wright put Bigger on trial in a court; the makers of "Native Son" (2019) put him on trial in the streets

·         Wright himself  changed his novel in his 1950 film; we are rolling Wright's wheel forward; it would not be fair to Wright to tell the story as he told it in 1940

·         "That's what artists do.  They fuck shit up" (Rashid Johnson)

The Q&A reminds me that 79 years stand between the first audience for Bigger Thomas and the current audience.  As a critic who wishes to be true to his own prejudices regarding historical consciousness and ethical in dealing with deformations (the new film)  which challenge, undermine, question the legitimacy of prejudices, I experience dread.



Perhaps my dread is actually a dread of recognition, recognition that 79 years of change in the nature of the world and of how art can function in it constitute a genuine existential threat.  I fear that a kind of pragmatic racial wisdom that enabled my people to survive the institution of slavery in a past is leaking into oblivion.  I have a degree of panic regarding the necessity of inevitable and  endless intergenerational conversations, many of them being mere talk  (without action) that rejects the reproduction of wisdom.  Perhaps I dread that my critical thinking and critical cultural tools are items  of nostalgia .  Perhaps I dread most the impossibility, until one is brain dead and buried, of existing beyond the rules/laws of universal enslavement.  Perhaps I dread that when I do actually have the chance to watch "Native Son" (2019), I shall have to drink a deadly brew of aversion and attraction.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            January 30, 2019

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