OF NATIVE DAUGHTERS AND SONS


OF NATIVE DAUGHTERS AND SONS

 Since 2016, it is obvious that unbridled ego and fascist thirst for power has infected the United States of America.  Everywhere, in all sectors of our lives, one finds evidence.  Our once cherished longing for rule of law and reason has rapidly diminished.  American citizens distrust one another and luxuriate in hatreds which have brewed in the so-called New World since 1492.  We are trumped by confusion, vulgarity, and vicious contentions.  In old-school  slang , we are a hot mess.  We are sickened by physical, political, and psychological change.  The pathos of hope tantalizes us, as our language, our media madness,  and our abject doubts undermine belief in sanity, goodness, and civility. Have we become so civilized by technological advancements that we accept barbarity as our norm?



The answer to such a question is a kaleidoscope, an unpredictable thing.  Yet, we trudge along as we have done for centuries, denying  that the oblivion of humanity is our fate.  Perhaps it is not.  Perhaps native daughters and sons of this Earth shall survive the evidence of things unknown and unseen.  Perhaps as a cultural phenomenon, the current screening of the third film version of Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son is an omen.



I have not yet seen the film which resulted from collaboration Suzan-Lori Parks, the writer of the screenplay, and Rashid Johnson, the movie's director .  Thus, I can't condone or condemn it.  Nevertheless, I have read much of the "buzz" that emerged from the film's premier at Sundance and dozens of articles about the adaptation of Wright's novel , the recycling of the 1951 and 1986 films of Wright's masterpiece.  The breadth  of coverage and  the disconnections of critique prepare me to reject being taken in by opportunistic hype.  I resist the conclusion Troy Patterson reached in the pages of the New Yorker about the ending of the film: "It means that an intelligent grappling with a classic text has reached the limit of what the text has left to offer.  The  movie, deviating from the book, will grant its protagonist humanity by turning him into a Christ figure who dies for America's sins, and the book like the coal furnace, will prove to be obsolete."  Nor will I agree, without severe qualifications, with Rashid Johnson's opinion, delivered in a Chicago Tribune interview (March 31, 2019): "I think this book and this story has so much to do with fear and anxiety and the way that we make decisions when we're facing existential concerns and our understanding of who we are as opposed to who we may be viewed as.  I just thought it was really pressing to start to talk about those ideas."



It escapes me why there's a need "to start to talk" (as if we are saying something new) about what thousands of African Americans and other people have continuously talked about in a never-to-be-concluded conversation since 1940.  I suppose that many young people born after 1999 have not been encouraged to participate in the long conversation at home or in their schools, that it will not be easy for them to reconcile James Baldwin's forced rejection, on aesthetic grounds,  of Richard Wright's primal intentions with the entitlement to transform Bigger Thomas into likeable, post-racial character.  What's to like about the dynamics of rampant capitalism and vile systemic  racism in our nation?  I imagine when I  get around to writing about the film I may succeed in saying something meaningful about the need to reject Hollywood hype and to think coldly and critically about the terminal rewards of failing to remember our historicity.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            April 10, 2019




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