Jerry Ward's Blogspot

  IN THE USA   Carson MxCullers (1917-1967) was probably happy on June 4, 1940.   Her first novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published.   Richard Wright commended her ability "to rise above the pressures of her environment….in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness." Having published Native Son a few months earlier, Wright quickly recognized the agony of her moral isolation.   Today is the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre (May 31-June 1, 1921).   But most Americans do not grieve for the women and men and children who were massacred; they grieve with violent laughter   on Memorial Day for dead soldiers. In this nation moral choices are strange. The National Urban League has raised a question that demands an answer: "Where are we 100 years after the Tulsa Massacre?" I suspect   the proper answer is that we are wherever we think we are.   "Far too many students of Black literature, as well as American scholars in general," accordin

  ANOTHER NOTE ON INJUSTICE   Virgil Tibbs, the protagonist in the film "In the Heat of the Night"(1967), is remote from Fred Daniels, the main character in Richard Wright's novel The Man Who Lived Underground (2021).I paraphrase one of Julia Wright's observations about her father's book in a May 25 zoom session from Arkansas.   It is not a protest novel; it is literature .   Likewise, the film is not protest cinema; it is visual art, visual narrative.   This is an assertion that Americans of no-color devoutly refuse to honor. They do not want to leave Plato's allegorical cave. Quel domage .   We might marvel, as Countee Cullen long ago marveled about poetry.   Despite their individual differences, Daniels and Tibbs suffer in common the indignities manufactured by American society even in the 21st-century. Officers of the law irrationally assume African American women and men are innately criminal.   They must be severely policed.   Genuine art

  Tuesday's Turmoil   I am weary.   Weary of violence. Weary of time, crime, space, and death.   Weary of cognitive limits and cognitive cancer . Weary of the burden of memory. Weary of being paralyzed   by writing and pandemic and efforts to be intelligent in prisons of ignorance   and systemic traditions. When I announce my weariness to a friend, he offers me cold comfort: life is not a crystal stair.   So what? I do not have the skills of a Sherpa in climbing mountains. Suicide is an enticing option.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             May 25, 2021  

  SUMMER READING 2021   Gwendolyn Brooks summed up a lot of folk wisdom in four words:   FIRST FIGHT. THEN FIDDLE.  This imperative does not limit our habitual enjoyment of literature, drama, fiction, the sciences and a range of arts, but it does serve as a powerful reminder that we ought not squander time. We ought to invest more in critical, analytic thinking which empowers us to detect forces that seem to be making remarkable progress in destroying whatever has been positive in the American democratic experiments. FIRST FIGHT. THEN FIDDLE.   We ought to devote summer reading to examining what is prophetic in such political fictions as Brave New World, 1984 , and Animal Farm and The Man Who Lived Underground along with the speculative fictions of Octavia Butler, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Cade Bambara.   The American population (2021) is approximately 33, 915, 073 plus or minus newly born children and those who die daily from COVID-19.  Life expectancy is estimated to be

    POETS & PROPHETS & INCONVENIENT PEOPLE   Poets and prophets do not tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.   They are neither   "under oath" nor are they omniscient.   They are inconvenient people, as common and limited as we all are. They can share nothing more than slivers of what we think truth is, and they depend on our being intelligent enough to put slivers together as if we were connecting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.      When Woodie King and Earl Anthony edited Black Poets and Prophets: The Theory, Practice, and Esthetics of the Pan-Africanist Revolution (1972), they delivered a sliver of truth about cultural nationalism and the importance of nationalism of one kind or another in the evolving of cultures .Forty-eight years later, we are still dealing with slivers. Today, however, the pieces are colored by the pandemic-driven "new" normal, namely nonsense.   I have been justly accused of being a prophet of doom.   The accusation

 v   GETTING RICHARD WRIGHT RIGHT   It is not exactly easy to get Richard Wright right, to minimize the filters of our prejudices. In an   urbane commentary on The Man Who Lived Underground in the June 2021 issue of The Atlantic , pp. 83-84,   Imani Perry succeeds almost absolutely in persuading us that Wright's novel is "a Protestant work, as much about God as it is about Black people, as Wright himself explains in an accompanying essay about the novel's origins titled "Memories of My Grandmother" (84).Throughout the commentary, Perry employs olive branches of qualifications and reminds us of the need to read the olive branches in Wright' s White Man, Listen!   Perry foregrounds Wright's "bleak prescience" (83) and comes to a logical conclusion about the protagonist Fred Daniels: " He finds himself encountering the world, unfiltered by established terms of order, and acquires a tenderness for all people.   In the end, his Black exi

  COMIC IMPERATIVES (remembering Paul Mooney)   "like muscadine grapes growing wild on the vine it jes-grew in/to us making us free men and women"   Charlie R. Braxton, "Shot House Blues"     When engaged with judicious outrage he pressed scuppernongs into laughter unashamed and named the wrongs and rights in/to being for a racy audience with comic imperatives none of us would avoid.   Let time applaud his genius to flay lies and leave the room in a pile of blood-fleshed comedy cluttering the anthropocene with implacable imperatives of imagination.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             5/20/2021 9:06:19 AM

  LET US LAMENT ON TUESDAY MORNING   I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. Lamentations 3.1   Pandemic is the rod; so too is our language; we are distracted by tantalizing desire for an ending. Like absurd characters we are waiting for perdition.  Media torments us as we wait. The New York Times conducts daily interrogations of the actual and the real. Whether it is in print or online, the newspaper signs, seals and delivers us to fascist confusions. Cancel culture afflicts us with cognitive cancer.  We hang between Kraft durch Freude and Kraft durch Freud.   On May 17, Michelle Goldberg, an NYT opinion columnist, offered "Kushner's Absurd Peace Plan Has Failed."  She tried to persuade readers that "the Abraham Accords, the ersatz Middle East peace plan," which Kushner helped to construct, was a bribe.  The United States wanted Arab and Muslim nations to believe Israel and Palestine were having nothing more than "a

  A SUNDAY MORNING   This has a weekend for laughter and not-laughter.   I laughed as I read extensive commentaries on the fate of the classics at Howard University.  The absence of commentary on the fate of the classics at M.I.T. and the University of Utah rendered me incapable of laughing.  I was reduced to wondering what a novel entitled HOMER WAS WATCHING SATAN would be. A best-seller among militant, cancel culture Republicans?  A book that would cause many Democrats to weep over how successful the murder of American  democracy has become?   It is known in the underground that Jimmy Crow has mental health issues and is stockpiling weapons of massive destruction.   I did not welcome the allegation that a person named Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Palestinians in 1994, nor did I welcome inadequate coverage of violence in Uganda.  Pandemic and how the world is turning have afflicted me with stage 2 hypertension.  I did welcome the progress I am making in answering interv

  THE PROBLEM   OF SOLIDARITY   Standing in solidarity with people to protest and critique issues we deem unjust has a long, politically attractive history.   How does solidarity begin?   How does it end; does it either assume new forms of being supportive or become inert and silent?   There is no single response to these questions, no consensus of response. We move forward, dragging hopes and promises behind us.   I became more than a little concerned when I got an email this morning from SAMIDOUN. NET.   This organ of the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network requested   that I take action, May 15 to May 22, and express support for the Palestinian resistance.   I was invited to check out https://wolpalestine.com/resources/rally-toolket for a list of options .I did not access that site, because I am uncertain about the immediate value of my marching in the streets of New Orleans and chanting "Defend Jerusalem.   Defend the Palestinians."   If I march in the Cre

  TALKING/THINKING/WRITING   Under the influence of pandemic, my terms of engagement with everyday life have made me a bit strange unto myself   and more conservative than I was twenty years ago.   My conservatism is more philosophical than political, although I can't escape from language which is a priori a feature of polis . Unless I refuse to use language, refuse to speak and write, I am existentially "political."   My conservatism is idiosyncratic, endlessly amusing, and a source for profound moral anxiety.   Recent conversations with my trustworthy friends keep me trembling on the brink of recognition.   My new conservatism makes me want to hold fast to what is good and just in African American history and cultural traditions, to hang on to being a product of three continents. Hanging on to anything under the influence of pandemic is a mighty struggle.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             May 12, 2021  

  REED'S GAMING WITH TIME     Reed, Ishmael.  The Terrible Fours .  Montréal: Baraka Books, 2021. ISBN 978--77186-23-1     $22.95 Among living American writers, Ishmael Reed is s superb iconoclast. He smashes all the cognitive idols   identified by Sir Francis Bacon and a few that Bacon failed to identify. In his plays, satirical essays, poems, and fictions we discover the power of writing to expose and dismantle stupidities.  He entertains us.  He enlightens us.  His mirrors, as it were, motivate readers to experience the truth of things unseen as they get on with their ordinary lives. Or it may that readers are so  saturated with data that they see everything in order to see nothing.  Like his literary ancestors, Reed disturbs the peace with his uncanny analyses of what many of us deem inconvenient: the tension between the actual and the real.  One character describes America as "home. A country where truth and fiction were always trading places" (119). The Te

  Pandemic Monday People who live in snow countries may have many words to describe variations of snow.   People who live in New Orleans need as many words to describe rain and gray skies.   But we are slow.   We do not rush to grab just any foundational metaphor floating in Bayou St. John.   Have adventures.   Read such novelists as Vance Bourjaily, Dorothy West,   John Hurt, Keenan Norris, James Cherry, Henry Van Dyke, Cyrus Colter, George Cain, Alice Childress, and Ronald Fair in tandem with Toni Cade Bambara, Ishmael Reed, Clarence Major, John Edgar Wideman, N. Scott Momaday, Hal Bennett, John A. Williams, John Oliver Killens, and Langston Hughes.   Celebrate American fiction.   Under the influence of cultural curiosity,   baptize once again your intelligence.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             May 10, 2021  

ENTERTAINMENT FOR A SPRING MORNING   "The story does not really end, for as long as people are alive, there is no possible and definite conclusion to their troubles or hopes of dreams ." Vladimir Nabokov on Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog"   Like the gross events in what we call world history, the Cold War (1947-1991) transcends itself to remain   a thorn of revelation.   It forces us to admit, however reluctantly, that human beings possess the will to dominate, torment, and eradicate one another.   This tendency has lived since human beings evolved from whatever on Earth. This penchant for cosmic evil is a permanent feature of humanity. It will last "for as long as people are alive." The Cold War did not end in 1991.   Pandemic is magnifying glass, telescope and electronic microscope, a tool for discovering what has always been the human condition with scant regard for the cumbersome categories of class, gender   and gender fluidity, ra

    A NOTE ON THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY   For all its legendary imperfections, the Black Arts Movement (BAM)   produced much good.   It steadfastly produced texts for black communities.   Kalamu ya Salaam's The Magic of Juju: An Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement (2016) is an excellent introduction to the subject. BAM provided the relative freedom from being measured by "alien rulers."   Under new names which change frequently, BAM is still operative in its quest for an elusive Black solidarity.   Do not believe the liars who would tell you that BAM fizzled and died.   Diversity and contradictions within co-existing   communities abound.   This fact is a heavy burden for thinkers who want to address the idea of Blackness, who want to discover effective languages for everyday use.   In the dialectics of Blackness (or any "color-nest" ), the thinker is assumed to be subjectively guilty until proven to be objectively innocent.   The bur

  A MIND MEANDERS ON TUESDAY MORNING   It is possible to discover amazing grace if you let your mind wander as it wonders.   It works for me as I wait for the pandemic to recede.   Living in modernity has taught me that human beings are problematic grains of sand.   Read How to Lie With Statistics (1954) by Darrell Huff.   The book can help you to appreciate how saturated 2021 is with lies. I have never forgotten how enlightened I became after I read the book   in the Magnolia High School library in 1958 or 1959.   I had a crush on the very beautiful librarian.   "I think," Anne Moody said, "my book is my gun."   I concur.   Coming of Age in Mississippi continues to be an effective paper bullet.   I could not find Lifebuoy soap at the supermarket.   The supermarket reminds me of a book by Harryette Mullen.   You do know, do you not, who Harryette Mullen is?   Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African American Intellectual by Kenneth

 v MESSAGE FROM MY GREAT-GREAT GRAND FATHER   WHO WILL NOT TELL ME HIS NAME   My dear Son,   Us have fit the battle for 200 years and us still be fighting.   I command   you to read the thirty volume opus on the illegal history of North America, giving sustained notice to footnote 66,   Volume 13, page 943:   "In the post-future dystopia of the post-human world, the word DECORUM has been erased from every known language, and bio-mechanical   critters accepted the absence with devout stupidity.   The few of us who dared to complain were kidnapped and transported to North American death-camps..   Us prevailed. Us managed to overcome torture, to grow   fat and feisty on poisoned foodstuff, and to preserve our lives with ironic laughter."   My dear son, do not dishonor our sacrifices with lame-assed excuses about "progress." Fight and fight and fight. Fight to honor your mother.   With love,   Your baba   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             M