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 gene...

  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. ...

  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....

    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 prop...

 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