the burden of re-reading TKP

 

THE BURDEN OF RE-READING THE KATRINA PAPERS

 

4 Nov 20

 

Re-reading THE KATRINA PAPERS reminds me that more anger than pity energized the writing of the book.  Prior to the Flood's causing unfiltered feelings about the mind in pain ----I go back to 1968-1970

( my Army/Vietnam years) when anger, irony, pain, and academic paralysis associated with writing incarcerated me.  When trauma bloomed most fully in my life, liberation happened.  I broke out of jail to become the writer I am today.

 

Fifteen years after the Flood in New Orleans, the ending of THE KATRINA PAPERS  assumes new significance as the entire world has commerce with the unholy trinity (COVID -19, climate change, chaos).  The words on page 233 are apt assertions for 2020

 

"Post-Katrina contradictions breed in my soul and body and in the contexts my selves inhabit.

 

I give mystery permission to celebrate me.

 

                                                                STOP & EXIT

 

The journal stops.  Trauma doesn't conclude.  No tidy solutions demand summary.

 

Stop.

 

Clear the throat.

 

Exit into a pre-future of unknowns."

 

THE KATRINA PAPERS made me braver, more honest, pessimistic, willing to accept that trauma of one sort or another (physical, spiritual, psychological) is an integral part of being human.  I do not deny the existence of faith, hope, and charity, but these virtues play a minimal role in my terms of engagement. I must defend my selves.

 

Although writing and critical thinking can't prevent someone's killing me, writing and thinking lessen the probability that I will end up a fool in love.  The word "love" is used excessively and a bit cheaply in 2020.

"Love" is to be used cautiously and reserved for the very limited number of people you can trust with your life.

 

7 Nov 20

 

Re-reading THE KATRINA PAPERS was preparation for discussing the book with Dr. Rian Bowie's  students in two classes at Wake Forest University.  Our November 4 ZOOM sessions revealed the need for people of my generation  to speculate  on the assumptions that contemporary students make.  Several of the students complained they are weary of the daily news regarding COVID and political divisions in the United States.  One student said she wrote 5 good things each day as a remedy for pain.  I dare assume she was referring to pain or general discomfort or fears pertaining to the American social and cultural dimensions of today.  Another student was much concerned that polarization is eroding human decency.  All of the students had read THE KATRINA PAPERS and  seemed interested in my feelings about the book and about the contact/combat zones none of us can avoid.  I tried to answer their questions .  The jury is still out on whether I succeeded in doing so.  After discussions, I have second and third thoughts about what I was incapable of saying during the exchanges.

 

When I watched Isaac Julien's 1995 documentary "Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks" this morning, I remembered telling the students how important it is to free ourselves from the black/white binary and to think of how complicated discourses about red, brown, white, yellow, and black infect our historical consciousness.  Fanon analyzed the binary most brilliantly, but he did not champion, as I do, the dismissal of the binary as a legitimate category of cognition.  The binary cannot be wished away, but its validity can be denied. None of us in the USA can escape the binary and achieve total freedom, total independence of the kind Richard Wright's character Cross Damon sought in The Outsider.  Nevertheless, I am willing to work assiduously to deny legitimacy to the binary and the offensive code term "people of color."  I deem both of these things to be a mountain of  Western bullshit.  As an innate part of systemic racism, these thing nurture benign genocide.

 

 I am not sure I dealt with that subject in THE KATRINA PAPERS----perhaps I merely hinted at it, but I did try to deal with it in my exchanges with Wake Forest students.  It is important that some of them read Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-education of the Negro.

 

 Watching the documentary on Fanon sponsored ideas about

·         depersonalized selves

·         nine orders of avenging inhabitants of heaven ---Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, and Angles ; such Roman Catholic imagining makes John Milton's Paradise Lost a Protestant capitalist manifesto

·         COVID-19 as Nature's experiment with Yellow Skin, Red Masks

·         how the strange fruit of solidarity and alliances is always hanging from a branch

·         how in 2020 the language of reconciliation has been destroyed beyond repair in the United States , how in a future the  language fragments may be useful for nothing more than broadcasting delusions of détente

Be assured these ideas will inform what I write henceforth.  The obligation to deal with pre-future unknowns bids me to write with the wild freedom I used in creating THE KATRINA PAPERS.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            November 7, 2020

 

 

 

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