end of the year

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 how 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 yet-to-be-canonized multiethnic writers help us to keep our critical thinking skills very sharp as we make meaning of texts and contexts,  the functions of writing in the production of histories.  Likewise, there is satisfaction in tutoring adult male prisoners who are anxious to obtain high school certification by passing the Hi-Set Exam (new version of the GED) and even more anxious to be reminded that incarceration does not erase their humanity.  My blogs reveal little about my 2019 struggles with health issues.



The year began with my having an operation for an abdominal aortic aneurysm.  In October, I had two operations for other ailments; I am making relatively  slow but good recovery now.   On December 30, I shall have an infusion to retard the progress of loss of bone density.  Although my body is not in pain,  I am quite annoyed with loss of appetite and the consequent loss of weight.  People lie.  Mirrors do not.  For several months I resembled Kafka's hunger artist or an abused person in a Nazi concentration  camp.  Perhaps illness and old age have made me a better person.  Only God knows.  And I am very grateful to those of you who have prayed for my well-being, who have encouraged me to not go with blind resignation into night, who have assured me that I still have a few more years of hard work to accomplish.



A few days ago, I wrote



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.



and I shall use Kwanzaa 2019 as an opportunity to translate some of the implications of that poem into a list of things-to-do in 2020.  I refuse to make resolutions, those empty promises to the Self that I have no intention of fulfilling.  Please accept my advice and do likewise, because in the Age of Trump we have no existential options to escape time.  We only have time to make prudent choices and to assist one another in using our diverse skills and our intellects to design a future that does not abandon the humanity which our ancestors so bravely suffered and died for that we might be.



Ashé,



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.