Blog1.1.2021

 

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 galvanizing omen of things to come in our nation, about the enormous space in which we shall live and die long after COVID-19 becomes as harmless that the annual flu.  The film is an aesthetic gaze upon possibilities.   As Manohia Dargis wrote in "  'Bacurau ' Review: Life and Death in a Small Brazilian Town "

(New York Times, March 5, 2020), the film is at once a metaphor of Brazil and "story deeply rooted in a precisely mapped place."  The mapped place is as imaginary as those created by Ernest Gaines and William Faulkner.  It is there we locate the source of dread.  Imagined reality often proves more genuinely "real" than verifiable inscriptions of events in time/space.  Dargis did not suggest the mapped place is the USA, but my viewing persuaded me that I was looking at my own country.  I was looking at a place where mercenaries (some of them my fellow citizens) commit terrorism and genocide for hire.  they operate in the name of Adolph Hitler's God.

 

In Portuguese "bacurau" refers to a nightjar, a nocturnal bird. Semantics might tempt us to re-translate "nightjar" as "chamber pot."  Irony.  All is irony.  Indeed, conscious mistranslation is one chance to discover the  "positivity" of 2021. Imagined reality often proves more genuinely "real" than verifiable inscriptions of events in time/space.

 

As we move in the ambiance of pandemic through always changing and competing  spaces of Afrofuturism and Afropessimism, we have new opportunities to measure ( by ourselves for ourselves ) what has transpired in the United States of America since 1921. We need to know the systemic dynamics  of horror American style.  I find it difficult to think otherwise as two statements from the film  reverberate in my mind: "So much violence" and "This is only the beginning."  Ah, BACURAU; ah, humanity; ah, love; ah, hope.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

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