Jerry Ward's Blogspot

Anticipating 2020 Evil is a contagious choice . Prepare. 1.        Speak plainly.   Avoid jargon that mystifies. Don't be abstruse. 2.        Read articles and books that challenge your cherished prejudices. 3.        Use critical thinking and inductive reasoning   in constructing arguments;   segregate verifiable facts from enthralling opinions. 4.        Be cold, nuanced, and confident.   Meekness in a combat zone is not effective. 5.        Stand your ground.   Blast first.   Apologize later. Act. 1.        March forth with discipline, honesty, and rededication to ancestral wisdom. 2.        Let us be supportive and constructively critical of one another. 3.      ...

KWANZAA ANNOTATIONS: building a cage for meaning WINTER poems --what they bury blooms in SPRING WHEN IMAGES   MAKE WAR   IN WINTER words celebrate irony:   Gosden and Correll, old inkfaces blazing for no exit, blazing in justice, blazing forever more the faux-blackness of what James believed to be "the real thing." When truth is truly told Rastus, Jemima, and Ben take paper to pen, implode boxes, deform cages, liberate graven images of iconic laughter, eradicate soul damage. Such epic chaos has become the duration of beauty, the unheard noise of peace, the unseen evidence of treaties yet unsigned. December 21,2019 ANNOTATIONS Stanza 1 ---The proximity of Christmas Day and Kwanzaa provides a habitation for irony and reasons for thinking about appropriation, how people of African ancestry (products of linguistic and physical creolizations ) have incorporated contradictions in the historical process ...

KWANZAA 2019   / NOTES   1.   UMOJA (unity)   ---Face it.   Striving for unity in the family, the community, the nation, and the race is praiseworthy.   Notice, however, the results of striving are contingent.   Forces beyond our control are operative.   Erosion of will power leads wretchedness;   systemic racism is an abstract equivalent of nuclear warfare;   benign genocide, a staple in education, flourishes; bad choices and self-hatred maintain dysfunction.   Family is not necessarily a traditional unit   of parents, children, and assorted relatives.    "The community" is an ungainly trope.   It is useful in moments of extreme crisis.   At other times the phrase fails to provoke rigorous analysis of how we organize ourselves and our contradictions "The Nation" is most certainly only "unified" in stories of inclusion and   excluding , the object of many revisions; some of these revisions te...

END OF THE YEAR LETTER New Orleans, LA December 25, 2019 Dear Friends, If you read a few of my daily blogs, you have some clues about the pleasure I experience in doing research for my book on Richard Wright's life,   his intellectual power, and the rationale for using his legacy as a guide for exploring ho w to make sense of twenty-first century issues. That work has enabled me to refine and intensify my terms of engagement with people and things.   There is great satisfaction to be gained from discussions of literature and our life histories with senior citizens in the People Program, a continuing education opportunity sponsored by the Sisters of the Congregation of St. Joseph.   We thoroughly enjoy a kind of freedom from the demands of literary theory and criticism, because our acts of reading and interpretation are grounded in discovery   ---   discovery of why works by Southern writers,   African American writers, and...

THE PECULIAR POVERTY OF THEN They can neither write nor read cursive.   If they happen to write a tweet on paper, they must print it. They adorn their bodies from pate to sole of foot with   tribal markings, tattoos incapable of explaining themselves. Please note   that the markings of maligned "primitives" follow an exquisite logic.   They do not have the ability to articulate such logic.   They practice gluttony in the consumption of tweets, allow what little remains of their minds to grow obese and lethargic, and   habitually confuse ignorance and steel-clad misinformation with lore or wisdom.   They equate what was once deemed to be "good, true, and beautiful" with excrement that saturates the air they breathe and renders the ground upon which they walk to be a toxic wasteland. Gender, blurred or blended gender, and no gender has high priority in the domains they inhabit.   Content to become post-human machines, they have no curiosi...

WHEN IMAGES   MAKE WAR   IN WINTER words celebrate irony:   Gosden and Correll, old inkfaces blazing for no exit, blazing in justice, blazing forever more the faux-blackness of what James believed to be "the real thing." When truth is truly told Rastus, Jemima, and Ben take paper to pen, implode boxes, deform cages, liberate graven images of iconic laughter, eradicate soul damage. Such epic chaos has become the duration of beauty, the unheard noise of peace, the unseen evidence of treaties yet unsigned. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             December 21,2019

ISHMAEL REED'S MORAL COMPASS Reed, Ishmael.   Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico . Montreal : Baraka Books, 2019. Many American thinkers have tried , by way of philosophical essays, jeremiads, reflections on habits of the heart and soul, provocative manifestos, and open letters,   to improve our nation's debatable social contracts and fragile moral compass. Indigenous victims of imperial genocide, enslaved persons and   slavery' s   enemies;   poets and writer of many colors;   advocates for equity, human rights, and social justice; clergymen and clergywomen and a small number of elected   officials---all of them , the dreamers   and the doers have participated in moral and ethical warfare.   Fighting.   Since the mid-twentieth century, Ishmael Reed has been deep,   abrasive, and didactic,   an iconoclastic champion of what is "good" and a formidable critic of what is "bad" in domestic and transnational aff...

CULTURE GAMES:     A Note to Langston Hughes As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods, They kill us for their sport. King Lear , IV.i Dear Mr. Hughes: Unable to deny that American literature has been and continues to be multiethnic, more a confederation of letters than a   unified republic, the once and never again guardians are disconsolate.   The Establishment trembles with remembering the literatures of the United States is neither lily nor snow white.   As is the wont of little gods, they try to make revenge a divisive sport.   One ethnic writer at a time is acclaimed the voice of her or his people.   In the rare instance of Toni Morrison, she speaks for the Americans have not wed irreversible insanity.   In the worst scenarios, the ethnic writer speaks for an artificial thing named people of color. So cruel. So crude. Everything has changed since 1926, only to remain the same.   S...

RICHARD WRIGHT TODAY: the   Context of Black Lives Matter Richard Wright's legacy, as substantial and diverse a body of works as we can expect from a major American writer who possessed an always expanding cultural and political consciousness regarding the things of this world, deserves to be critiqued with respect and caution.   That   legacy continues to be of more than ordinary importance in the first quarter of the twenty-first century . Wright   habitually struggled, from his early publications in the 1930s to the last novel   he wrote just before his death, A Father's Law ,   to achieve what he once proclaimed is the most difficult thing in the world: the effort to tell the truth.   There is obviously   no consensus among us   about the truth , for we judiciously remain in doubt about truth as a category of human cognition.   Truth is not an absolute securely located in a realm of Platonic ideals. It is located in our so...

ADVENT 1819 I am the vision of my children yet unborn, the rosebuds in their eyes. Here pink dawns purple days, an insurance for nights when indigo hands might be assassins painting murals of revolts, the confirmations, annual advents which open, which close, which respond which call the white noise of disappeared promises. Grand expectations of oil of water, of frantic climate, of wrath, of yesterday tomorrow I am the vision. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             December 10, 2019

On John Hatch and Self-Published Fiction Mississippi Swamp .Chicago: 2nd Sight Books, 2001. Africa, Love.   Berkeley: 2ndsightbooks.com, 2002 Love in Times of Outrage . Berkeley: 2ndsightbooks.com, 2007. In the realm of African American fiction, self-publishing seems to have become more commonplace   than it was fifty years ago.   Back in the day, many writers who simply had to have a book used vanity presses to put their stories between covers.     Companies were willing to capitalize on misdirected   vanity.   But among those who rushed to be in print, there were probably some gifted   writers whose impatience led to invisibility.   The Project on the History of Black Writing has archived a substantial amount of self-published work, and scholars may discover some forgotten gems in the archives.   One hopes the self-publishers of now will be wiser than their ancestors. John Hatch is an ancestor, a...

THE JOY OF READING Blessed are astute, critical readers; they most often avoid incarceration in ignorance, *In "Blueprint for Negro Writing," (1937) Richard   Wright noted the Negro writer's "vision need not be simple or rendered in primer-like terms; for the life of the Negro people is not simple.   The presentation of their lives should be simple, yes; but   all the complexity, the strangeness, the magic wonder of life that plays like a bright sheen over the most sordid existence, should be there. To borrow a phrase from the Russians, it should have a complex simplicity . Eliot, Stein, Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, and Anderson; Gorky, Barbusse, Nexo, and Jack London no less than the folklore of the Negro himself should form the heritage of the Negro writer."   1937.   Wright was of his time. He was   also in advance of it. His mind had already detected   what is stated plainly in Kluger, Jeffrey. Simplexity . New York: Hyperion, 2008....