Jerry Ward's Blogspot

  Notes on a novel by Candice Love Jackson   Exposure in Southern literature   is useful.   It helps readers to set straight misbegotten notions.   One of Faulkner's major contributions to discourses on the uncertainty of historical narratives is Absalom, Absalom .   Likewise, in her second novel   Finding His Treasure (2020), Candice Love Jackson sets readers straight about psychodramas and diversity in the lives of middle-class African Americans in pre-pandemic   Mississippi. Faulkner's contribution to modernist fiction was bought with stereotyped coins; Jackson's, with iconoclastic dollars. Southern exposure fails as exposure unless one recognizes how remote it is from politically correct "colourblindness."   One can appreciate innovative features in Jackson's second novel without having read her debut novel Deserving Grace (2019.   There is a special treat, of course, in having insider knowledge about the first novel,   a knowing that enables re

  January 25, 2021     Vicious divisions among American citizens multiply from one day to the next.  If we know some basic facts about the evolving narratives of what we glibly call American and world histories, we do not beg ignorance in bad faith. We do not delude ourselves into thinking the narratives speak for all the Constitution-protected American citizens.   Actuality delivers a mean punch. We erupt in despair, even if we think despair is an apt name for what Maximus Wright calls "soul damage." The time-walking wretchedness so eloquently voiced by David Walker and Frantz Fanon is a legacy to be argued with.   Emerging technologies and the suspect whims of journalists who manufacture the "news" from many angles do an excellent job making awareness of division inevitable. "News" consumes us more than we consume it. In a special philosophical sense, the news is a covert agent of enslavement. Ultimately, we become enslaved to the existential i

  POETRY   & THE POLITICAL   "Have we begun to begin?"   Sensing an incompleteness of   the rhetorical , my friend responded "Again?" Don't ignore opportunity.   Revise. "Have we begun to begin again?"   "Again to begin have we begun?"Choice.   Compromise.   Indecision. So many tasks for the ancient future.   January 20   Amanda Gorman's voice takes poetry into the soul of President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. What is conjured up is Robert Frost at the John F. Kennedy inaugural.   Frost almost stole the show. Gorman asserted her right to possess the moment.   Robinette is a solid French name.   On a whim, I make it English ---Robin and the net in Sherwood Forest. Poetry lets you get away with anything.   Would President Biden attempt to use poetry to unify a broken nation?   Perhaps he might do so in Wonderland, but those he has vowed to lead do not live there.   So, we can walk backwards into Abraham Lincoln as if n

  Inaugural Haiku January 20, 2021     Our flags are flying: COVID-saturated winds winter-whip symbols.     Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

  THE DARK HEART OF THE WHITENESS OF WHITENESS   Today I thank the AAIHS   ( African American Intellectual History Society) editors and bloggers for creating BLACK PERSPECTIVES, an exceptionally valuable site for sharpening insights about ways of knowing what needs to be known.   I have shared Eloisa Amezcua's poem "The Witch Reads Me My Birthchart" with a friend; the poem reminds me how much she and I enjoyed reading Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima with fellow senior citizens before pandemic took control.   I do miss the joy of that kind of social communion.   Que sera , sera.   Today's tasks include thinking about how to deal effectively with the dark heart of the whiteness of whiteness, a permanent feature of global history which has grown more threatening since January 6, 2021; the tasks include praying that the forces of evil do not harm President Biden and Vice President Harris during tomorrow's inaugural ceremonies.   It is a very brave th

  Yes.   It is summer. Writers arriving and dead still burn so fiercely.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             January 17, 2021

    INTIMIDATIONS OF MORTALITY "Historical situations vary; a man may be born a slave in a pagan society or a feudal lord or a proletarian.   What does not vary is the necessity for him to exist in the world, to be at work there, to be there in the midst of other people, and to be moral there." Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Existentialism   Sartre's assertion clashes dramatically with Niccolo Machiavelli's ever useful arguments in The Prince , particularly the warning that "A man who wishes to make a vocation of being good at all times   will come to ruin among so many who are not good."   To avoid ruin, one must balance being good with being evil. " I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."   I no longer remember the author of this quotation which I found on a yellowing index card.   Neither you nor I need to know the author.   We do need to be about t

  FAMILY MATTERS   "Lately researchers have found a new understanding of wildness in the study of chaotic and complex systems." James Gleick, Nature's Chaos (1990)   At the 26th annual FOR MY PEOPLE AWARDS (Jackson State University, January 14, 2021), Doris Derby, David Dennis, Sr. and David Dennis, Jr. were honored for their contributions to American history and social action.   I stress American history or narratives of the United States of America, because civil   and human rights are quintessentially American. They are pragmatic struggles to deal with the aberrations of our nation's experiments with democracy.   These struggles do not float about on the margins.   They are the center.   The oral histories that were integral parts of the award proceedings focused primarily on the black family as the primal agent in our conduct of everyday life.   The honorees did not disappoint in making an excellent case regarding how family matters.   As we cont

  READTOUGALOOCOLLEGEAUTHORSMONTH (February 2021)   Dear Tougaloo College Alumnae/Alumni,   I am pleased to send you a selective list of book-length works   by Tougaloo   graduates for READTOUGALOOCOLLEGEAUTHORSMONTH ---February 2021. We can be proud of the graduates who have enlarged and enriched the field of black writing and our ongoing creative and intellectual histories. I am indebted to   John S. Page, Jr   '64 for his invaluable help in constructing the list.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr. "64       Thomas Armstrong   Autobiography of a Freedom Rider: My Life as a Foot Soldier for Civil Rights. N.P.: Health Communications Inc, 2011.   Hermand Bennette Jr.   Come Walk with Me through Roses and Thorns Self-published 1981   Aint No Help N.P.: Delta Diamond,   1981.   David Patrick Bickham   Blackberry Juice from Blues Bones. Grenada, MS: Salt-Works   Press, 1988.   Jonathan Henderson Brooks   The Resurrection and Oth

  Dear _________,   My calling you was an act of desperation.   Lately, I am only at peace when I talk with someone whose friendship is extremely special.   Strangely, that peace doesn't occur in speaking with my first cousins once removed.   You are one of the very few people with whom I share uncensored   ideas, share   my intimidations of mortality.   Note that I allude to Wordsworth's final lines in "My Heart Leaps Up"----   The Child is father to the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.   and their use in the epigraph for "Ode: Intimations of Immortality."   I am no Romantic.   I am stuck with how mortality intimidates and have a lot of commerce with being mortal.   I do not delude myself about transcending the terms of engagement with reality and actuality that I set for myself.   As horrible as life is,   I am content to live in dread.   Richard Wright taught and continues to teach me well.   Wit

  Blog1.7.2021   January 6 was an ordinary day in the USA.   Ordinary days in our nation are troublem-fat, all oil and water in the Gulf of Mexico.   Like all the days that preceded it and all the days that follow it, January 6 carried the weight of the ancient normal ----universal trauma.   The Tribe of Trump desecrated the Holy Land of Washington, D. C.   Only four people died in the failed insurrection.   Had the tribal members been yellow, red, brown, or black, I estimate five or six hundred of them would have died. Color in our republic   is far from being democratic, and justice is blind, crippled, and crazy..   Remember these numbers.       B306.     T232.   Remember them on January 20, 2021, which will be just another ordinary day of spectacle and discord.   Remember and pray for President Biden and Vice President Harris. Remember   B/H46 .   Remember the Senate Gang of Six ----Tommy Tuberville (Alabama), Roger Marshall (Kansas) John Kennedy (Louisiana), Cindy Hyde

      "And then some white man hearing about oppressed Negroes on television will ask you for a little rational conversation on the subject.   This will be a man (this hypothetical questioner) who probably does not know that policemen are menacing subhumans, whose sociological conditioning ---because they are usually grandsons of immigrants, i.e. poor whites   --- has usually prepared them to hate niggers even before they get the official instructions (like James Bond) that they are 'licensed to kill.' " LeRoi Jones, "The Last Days of the American Empire" (1964)   In the pandemic-afflicted American Empire, the words of Jones/Baraka burn with prophetic fire as they remind us that prophets have been displaced by panderers.   This situation makes our work in 2021 delicate and dangerous.   So much sorting of false propaganda from true propaganda.   So much spinning of moral compasses in chaos. Who is killing whom with systemic immunity? Who is sellin

  On the seventh day of Kwanzaa, we deliver our reckoning to ourselves as IMANI.   IMANI then. IMANI forever.   IMANI now IMANI now. IMANI then. IMANI forever. IMANI forever. IMANI now.   IMANI then.   IMANI envelopes the Earth   January 1, 2021

  Blog1.1.2021   We have a new year.   We have a new opportunity to assess multiple social, environmental, and psycho-spiritual problems of mind and body.   We may fail to resolve any of these problems, but addressing them is the intelligent thing to do.   For this writing, we excludes people with whom it is impossible reasonable conversations. I am not unconditionally charitable.   Poverty minimizes the virtue of charity as it maximizes the virtues of love and hope.     We have new opportunities to examine what the narratives of history conceal and reveal about what is generally called American History.   We can re-examine the few bright moments in that history and attend with rigor to episodes of the terror, horror, and obscenity of that History which is too casually accepted as "normal" truth. We can participate democratically in the growth of knowledge.   Early this morning, I watched BACURAU (2019), a Brazilian film of more than a little merit.   It is a gal