Rae Armantrout will judge the 2010 Omnidawn Poetry Full Book Contest. Electronic and postal submissions will be accepted from March 1, 2010 to June 30, 2010. The 2010 Omnidawn Full Book Poetry Prize is Omnidawn Publishing’s third annual contest. open to a first or second book of poetry. The prize includes a cash prize of $3,000, Fall 2011 publication by Omnidawn, and 100 complimentary copies of the book. Publicity for the winning book includes a $4,000 advertising budget for display ads in American Poetry Review, American Book Review, Poets & Writers Magazine, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and other publications. Manuscripts will remain anonymous until a winner is selected. The reading fee for each manuscript is $25. The entry fee entitles you to any book in the Omnidawn catalog if you tell us which book you want and either send $3.26 in U.S. postage or add $3 to the $25 reading fee for a total of $28. We will enclose your book in a protective mailer and mail it to you. If you do not include this, we will assume you are not interested in receiving a book. A complete list of Omnidawn titles is available by clicking here. Four Submission Options: You may choose one of the following submission options: Submit both reading fee and manuscript on our web site. Submit both reading fee and manuscript via postal mail.  Submit reading fee on our web site and manuscript via postal mail.  Submit manuscript on our web site and reading fee via postal mail.    Deadline: —Manuscripts sent by postal mail must be postmarked between March 1, 2010 and June 30, 2010. —Electronically submitted manuscripts must be received between March 1, 2010 and midnight Pacific Standard Time on June 30, 2010.. Note that our web site will not accept submissions for the Full Book Contest before March 1. The only submissions it will accept before that date are for the Chapbook Contest, which runs from January 1 through February 28, 2010.   General Guidelines: — The entering manuscript must be your first or second full length poetry book. (If you have written two or more poetry books that have been published or self-published or accepted for publication you are ineligible for this contest.) Chapbook publication has no bearing on this. —Multiple submissions to this contest are acceptable, but each manuscript must be submitted separately, with a separate entry fee. —Please notify us of changes in your contact information with an email to submissions@omnidawn.com. —Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but please notify us with an email to submissions@omnidawn.com if your manuscript has been accepted elsewhere. —No revisions to submitted manuscripts will be considered. —Please do not enclose SASE for return of the manuscript; all pages will be recycled at the end of the contest. —Friends, colleagues, and students of the judge are not eligible to compete. —We will announce contest results by email, as well as at www.omnidawn.com/contest, and in advertisements in American Poetry Review and Poets & Writers Magazine.   Submission Requirements for the Manuscript: —The manuscript must be in English. Translations are ineligible. However, we do understand and respect the fact that some poets may choose to use some words from other languages occasionally in their poems. This is acceptable. —We suggest you submit 40 to 70 pages of poetry (not including the front matter). —The manuscript should be paginated, with a table of contents. —Include one cover page with title of manuscript only, and a second cover page with title plus your name, address, telephone number, email address, and where you learned about the Omnidawn book contest (to the best of your recollection). —Please do not include any identifying information in the manuscript except for the title page with contact info described immediately above.. —Please do not include any acknowledgements page, cover letter, or bio. —Individual poems in a contest manuscript may have been previously published in magazines, print or web journals, or anthologies, but the work as a whole must be original and unpublished. Self-published books are also NOT eligible. —We will announce the winner and finalists by email, in advertisements, and also at omnidawn.com/contest.   How We Judge—Each Manuscript is Read by at Least Two Editors:   Identifying information will be removed from all manuscripts before they are sent to an editor. All manuscripts will be given a number to associate them with the contact information of their submitters. All personal identifying information will then be removed from manuscripts before these are forwarded to editors. The Omnidawn staff members who remove the identifying information are NOT involved in the reading process. All manuscripts will then be read by at least two different editors. Only Omnidawn's Senior Poetry Editor and Poetry Editors will read submissions, and these editors will not have access to the identities of the submitters. For the sake of avoiding any conflict of interest, if an editor believes that he/she recognizes the work of a colleague, student, or friend, then that manuscript is given to another editor. The editors will select the semi-finalists to be sent to the judge. The judge will then select the winner and five finalists. If the judge wishes to see additional manuscripts, she may request them; the judge is not, however, permitted to request specific manuscripts. Friends, colleagues, and/or students of the judge are not eligible to compete. The judge is not allowed to choose manuscripts that present a conflict of interest. Omnidawn abides by The CLMP Code of Ethics. The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses’ community of independent literary publishers believes that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree to 1) conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our staff, editors, or judges; 2) to provide clear and specific contest guidelines -- defining conflict of interest for all parties involved; and 3) to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public. This Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that each model can be run ethically. We have adopted this Code to reinforce our integrity and dedication as a publishing community and to ensure that our contests contribute to a vibrant literary heritage.   Four Submission Options You may choose one of the following submission options: Option 1: Submit both reading fee and manuscript on our web site. Option 2: Submit both reading fee and manuscript via postal mail.  Option 3: Submit reading fee on our web site and manuscript via postal mail.  Option 4: Submit manuscript on our web site and reading fee via postal mail. Procedures for each of these options are listed in detail below. Option 1: Procedure to submit both reading fee and manuscript on our web site. —Please read these directions before proceeding to the online submissions web page. You will find the button to direct you there at the end of this procedure. —The online submissions page has been tested for use with Internet Explorer 6.0 and above, Safari 2.0 and above, and all versions of Firefox. Earlier versions may also work. The latest versions of these programs are available for free on the Internet. Your Internet browser must be set to accept cookies and to allow pop-ups in order to use our online submission program. —When you go to our online submission program, you will be asked to fill out your contact information. There is a COMMENTS box available to you. Please use this box to tell us where you learned about the Omnidawn contest to the best of your recollection. You may also add other information you would like us to know, but please do not use this box to share any personal or publication history. Because we intend to read your work anonymously, personal or publication history will be deleted before your manuscript is sent to an editor. —You will be able to upload your manuscript on the submissions page. Manuscripts must be sent in one file, not multiple files. Please submit manuscripts in either a Microsoft Word .doc file or an .rtf (Rich Text Format) file. Most word processing programs can save files as .rtf by going to FILE—SAVE AS, and then choosing Rich Text Format in the FORMAT drop-down box. —To receive an Omnidawn book of your choice, enter the title you want in the COMMENTS section of the web page and add $3 to the cost of your submission for a total of $28, which will cover the postage and mailing, and we will make the SASE for you and send the winning chapbook to your address. A complete list of Omnidawn titles is available by clicking here. —If you have problems with our website please send an email to service@omnidawn.com or call 510-237-5472. To begin electronic submission process, please click here. Option 2: Procedure to submit both reading fee and manuscript via postal mail: —If you would like an Omnidawn book of your choice sent to your address enclose postage and a letter size sheet of paper with your choice of book and your name and mailing address typed on it (we will use this as a mailing label for a protective mailer which we will use to send your choice of book). You have two options for sending postage: a. Add $3 to the $25 entry fee for a total of $28 to cover the cost of postage b. Enclose $3.26 in U.S. postage stamps on their original paper backing so we can take it off and place it on an envelope. —Reading fee of $25 (or $28 with your choice of Omnidawn book) must accompany each submission. This can be either a check or money order. Make checks or money orders payable to Omnidawn. —Please do not send FED EX, UPS, or signature required USPS Mail envelopes; they will not be accepted. Checklist for submitting reading fee and manuscript via postal mail. 1. A check or money order made out to Omnidawn for $25 (or for $28 with a letter size sheet of paper with your name and mailing typed out and listing your choice of Omnidawn book). A complete list of Omnidawn titles is available by clicking here. 2. Include 40 to 70 pages (suggested length) of poetry in a manuscript with Table of Contents and pagination. Include one cover page with identifying info and where you learned about our contest (to the best of your recollection), and one cover page with title only. Do not include acknowledgements or cover letter. 3. Postal submissions should be sent to: Full Book Poetry Prize Omnidawn Publishing 3263 Kempton Ave Oakland, CA 94611   Option 3: Procedure to submit reading fee on our web site and manuscript via postal mail. —Please read these directions before proceeding to the online payment web page. You will find the buttons to direct you there at the end of this procedure. —Entry fee of $25 must be enclosed for each manuscript. If you would like an Omnidawn book of your choice sent to you add $3 to the $25 entry fee for a total of $28 (which will cover cost of SASE, which we will make for you). A complete list of Omnidawn titles is available by clicking here. —When you make your payment on our web site, print out two copies of the receipt, save one, and send the other with your postal submission. —Please do not send FED EX, UPS, or signature required USPS Mail envelopes; they will not be accepted.   Checklist for submitting reading fee on our web site and manuscript via postal mail. 1. Printed receipt from our web site for payment of $25 (or $28 if you would like an Omnidawn book of your choice) 2. Include 40 – 70 pages (suggested length) of poetry in a manuscript with Table of Contents and pagination. Include one cover page with identifying info and where you learned about our contest (to the best of your recollection), and one cover page with title only. Do not include acknowledgements or cover letter. 3. Postal submissions should be sent to: Full Book Poetry Prize Omnidawn Publishing 3263 Kempton Ave Oakland, CA 94611 To begin electronic submission process, please click here.   Option 4: Procedure to submit manuscript on our web site and reading fee via postal mail. —Please read these directions before proceeding to the online submissions web page. You will find the button to direct you there at the end of this procedure. —The online submissions page has been tested for use with Internet Explorer 6.0 and above, Safari 2.0 and above, and all versions of Firefox. Earlier versions may also work. The latest versions of these programs are available for free on the Internet. — Your Internet browser must be set to accept cookies and to allow pop-ups in order to use this program. —When you go to our online submissions program Step 1 will ask you to click a payment button. Skip this step and go to Step 2. —In our online submission program, you will be asked to fill out your contact information. There is a COMMENTS box available to you. Please type in this sentence: “I am sending payment by postal mail.” (Without this sentence, we will contact you to remind you to pay the reading fee.) Also please use this box to tell us where you learned about the Omnidawn contest to the best of your recollection. You may also add other information you would like us to know, but please do not use this box to share any personal or publication history. Because we intend to read your work anonymously, personal or publication history will be deleted before your manuscript is sent to an editor. —You will be able to upload your manuscript on the submissions page. Manuscripts must be sent in one file, not multiple files. Please submit manuscripts in either a Microsoft Word .doc file or an .rtf (Rich Text Format) file.Most word processing programs can save files as .rtf by going to FILE—SAVE AS, and then choosing Rich Text Format in the FORMAT drop-down box. —If you have problems with our website please send an email to service@omnidawn.com or call 510-237-5472. —Once you have filled out the contact information and uploaded your manuscript, write a check or purchase a money order made out to Omnidawn. You may either pay $25, which will NOT include an Omnidawn book, or you can add $3 to the cost of your submission for a total of $28, which will cover the postage and mailing costs, and we will make the SASE for you and send your choice of Omnidawn book to your address. A complete list of Omnidawn titles is available by clicking here. —Please do not send FED EX, UPS, or signature required USPS Mail envelopes; they will not be accepted. Checklist for submitting manuscript via web site and reading fee via postal mail. 1. Include a check or money order made out to Omnidawn for $25 (or for $28 with a letter size sheet of paper with your name and mailing address typed out and listing your choice of Omnidawn book). 2. Include a sheet of paper that has your name, mailing address, email address, phone number, and title of your manuscript. 3. Reading fee and contact info should be sent to: Full Book Poetry Prize Omnidawn Publishing 3263 Kempton Ave Oakland, CA 94611 To begin electronic submission process, please click here.

SUBMISSIONS

The 2010 New Ohio Review Prize
in Fiction and Poetry

Contest Guidelines
Judges: Ann Beattie in fiction, Stephen Dunn in poetry
Postmark Deadline: May 15, 2010
Prize: First and second place prizes of $1,500 and $500 in each genre.
Entry Fee: $20 per entry (includes one-year subscription)

All entries will be judged blind, therefore please submit a cover page with your name and contact information. Your name should not appear on the manuscript. Prose entries must be no longer than 25 pages double-spaced. Poetry entries are limited to four individual poems. Contest results will be announced online. If you wish to receive the results through the mail, please enclose an SASE.

Please mail entries and payment to:

New Ohio Review Prize
English Dept.
360 Ellis Hall
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701

Checks should be made payable to New Ohio Review.

General Guidelines

New Ohio Review's contributors receive honoraria of $10/page for prose and $15/page for poetry, $30 minimum, in addition to two copies of the issue and a one-year subscription.

We accept literary submissions in any genre. Translations are welcome if permission has been granted. Please do not send more than six poems in a single submission. We do not reprint previously published work.

Our reading period is September-May, but we will consider work year-round from subscribers. Please do not submit more than once every six months. Mail submissions to:

New Ohio Review
English Dept.
360 Ellis Hall
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701

We currently do not accept electronic submissions.

Format: Please include a brief cover letter with your submission. Poems should be individually typed, either single- or double-spaced, on one side of the page. Prose should be typed double-spaced on one side and be no longer than thirty pages. Cross-genre work or any work that is unusually formatted is welcome, but please be aware that our page width and font size are restricted. We have no preferences regarding placement of author name, staples, or paper clips. Please do not include submissions in more than one genre in the same envelope.

Simultaneous submissions: Simultaneous submissions to other journals are fine as long as you indicate so in your cover letter and inform us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.

Submissions by mail: All manuscripts and correspondence regarding submissions should be accompanied by a S.A.S.E. For international submissions, please include a stamped International Reply Coupon (I.R.C.) with your S.A.S.E. or provide a valid e-mail address. Manuscripts can only be returned if sufficient postage is included.

Winnie Mandela accuses Nelson of 'betraying' the blacks of South Africa

 

By Colin Fernandez
Last updated at 12:34 AM on 09th March 2010

•  Comments (11)

Nelson Mandela has been accused by his former wife of betraying South Africa's black population.

In a savage attack, Winnie Mandela said he had done nothing for the poor and should not have accepted the Nobel peace prize with the man who jailed him, FW de Klerk.

The 73-year-old said her ex-husband had become a 'corporate foundation' who was 'wheeled out' only to raise money for the ANC party he once led.

 

Nelson Mandela and wife Winnie walk hand-in hand-with after Mandela's release from prison

She said Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a cretin and claimed the sacrifices of Steve Biko and others in the fight against apartheid were being overlooked.

The comments were made in an interview yesterday with Nadira Naipaul, the wife of novelist V S Naipaul.

Mrs Mandela became notorious in 1991 when she was jailed for six years for the kidnap of Stompie Moeketsi - a sentence later cut to a fine.

Stompie, 14, had been murdered three years earlier by members of Mrs Mandela's bodyguard, the Mandela United Football Club.

 

Party: Nelson and Winnie Mandela in 2004

 

She also caused outrage by endorsing the punishment of apartheid collaborators with ' necklacing' - putting burning tyres around their necks.

Yesterday she said: 'This name Mandela is an albatross around the necks of my family.

'You all must realise that Mandela was not the only man who suffered. There were many others, hundreds who languished in prison and died.

'Mandela did go to prison and he went in there as a young revolutionary but look what came out.

'Mandela let us down. He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically we are still on the outside. The economy is very much "white".

'I cannot forgive him for going to receive the Nobel with his jailer de Klerk. Hand in hand they went. Do you think de Klerk released him from the goodness of his heart?

'He had to. The times dictated it, the world had changed.'

 

The pair pictured together in 1990

The Mandelas, who divorced in 1996, were married for 38 years - although together for only five.

Mrs Mandela criticised her country's Truth and Reconciliation Committee - which she appeared before in 1997 and which implicated her in gross violations of human rights.

She said: 'What good does the truth do? How does it help to anyone to know where and how their loved ones are killed or buried?

'That Bishop Tutu who turned it all into a religious circus came here. He had a cheek to tell me to appear.

'I told him that he and his other like-minded cretins were only sitting there because of our struggle and me. Look what they make him do. The great Mandela. He has no control or say any more.

'They put that huge statue of him right in the middle of the most affluent white area of Johannesburg. Not here [in Soweto] where we spilled our blood.

'Mandela is now like a corporate foundation. He is wheeled out globally to collect the money.'

She said her daughters, Zenani, 51, and Zindzi, 50, had to struggle through red tape to speak to their 91-year-old father, who led South Africa from 1994 to 1999.

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What an evil woman she is, only lives her life to please herself, enriching herself wherever she can - what has she ever done for the poor, has she ever spend a cent of her own on others,not herself...sure she'll go straight to hell

- Lisa, Gauteng RSA, 09/3/2010 05:45

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Madame Matches and her ANC party are incrementally taking South Africa down the path to Zimbabwe. She will eventually get her wish and have a "black" economy, which means no economy ( really a typically African Marxist economy) and then we will all finally be equally poor, except for the the ANC elite who will still be living off the largess of the tax payer and driving around in their luxury vehicles. For a party that claims to hate capitalism, the ANC sure seem to enjoy the spoils of the free market. One thing is sure, the ANC is hellbent on stirring the race pot and fomenting hatred for the whites here. The only thing that happened in 1994 was that the revolution was postponed. The blood bath is on the way thanks to the hate of those like Winnie!

- Mark C, Cape Town, South Africa, 09/3/2010 05:23

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HEY LADY! YOUR husband was a TERRORIST! YOU knew about it! You could do a LOT more for humanity and history by telling us more about the facts, ma'am. We all know now that the Nobel prize is a farce.

- David, Bedford, New Hampshire, USA, 09/3/2010 04:48

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The lady speaks the truth!

- Divine Truth, L.A. USA, 09/3/2010 04:42

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Guess she's saying he sold out. What about her? Is she still out there suffering in Soweto? I doubt it.

Like Jesus said,
"First take the chunks from out your eye and then you may behold the splinter in your brother's eye and help him take it out."

Mr Mandela chose not give his life for the cause like Gandhi and MLKJ did. That's his own personal choice.

At the same time she would have wielded her "fire tyre justice" on as many bad "white" people as possible. I fail to see how that would have made things better. Is that revenge or "justice"?

"An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind."
Mohandas K. Gandhi

- steve, hamburg, 09/3/2010 04:11

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Just look to the North of South Africa and look how the once prosperous Rhodesia, the breadbasket of Africa, is now starving and completely coming apart as a gangland and rotten dictatorship grown from nepotism/despotism.
South Africa is a facade, its gonna collapse, because no matter how much money we throw at this raqcial divide mess, and no matter how hard the media tries to paint a pretty picture of balckness, the black run government is heading for a cliff and determined to drive everyone off the cliff like lemmings..I think we should go back to the way things were 50 years ago, and throw Mandela and his criminal wife back in jail and this time throw away the key for good. No more aid. Survival of the fittest...like Nigeria and Liberia...and every single country in sub sahara Africa..a rotten mess that was once kept civilized by colonialism. Lets go back to that, it worked and worked well.

- HOWARD HOFELICH, Kona Hawaii, 09/3/2010 04:07

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exclusive: VTech and Mochilla Meet Jay Electronica in New Orleans

by Joy on Mar.08, 2010, under Behind the Scenes, Mochilla, Other, VTech, Video

 

“Your entire community is gone…

You can’t go home, it doesn’t exist anymore”

-Jay Electronica

In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, Coleman and B+ were invited to New Orleans to screen Brasilintime and to make photos by the folks from Common Ground. Documenting the damages and the obstacles people were faced with to rebuild what was lost. In five days they had made enough images to have a benefit show at Self Help Graphics in LA.

Three years later on Halloween Weekend of 2009, VTech invited Mochilla back to New Orleans again - to attend the Voodoo Festival and to meet with Jay Electronica - New Orleans favorite representative – well, besides the Saints!

This video was shot that weekend. Though Jay proved to be quite elusive during our stay, we managed to get him over to his beloved Magnolia Projects in the Third Ward. His memories of growing up there and what it means to be there now stand as a striking reminder to all those of us lucky enough to escape these kinds of unnatural disasters.

It has taken us a second to bring you this video but the events that have occurred over the past few weeks mean that the message hasn’t lost any of its potency.

Take a minute to remember…

<p id="video_threefourthreesix_info" class="foxyvideoinfo" style="margin-top:0;width:640px;font-family:Arial;font-size:10px;"><span style="float:left;margin-top:6px;">The Sounds of VTech / jay_elec_3rdward_v5b </span><br style="clear:both;"></p>

 

 

 

FULL SCREEN
The Sounds of VTech / jay_elec_3rdward_v5b

Sex, Race, and Precious

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington - March 6, 2010

“IN THE beginning was not the shadow, but the act.” Ralph Ellison’s cause and effect dictum is applicable to any cinematic adaptation of a literary work: Before there was the movie, there was the book. But today—given the power of film, publicity, and celebrity—the cinematic shadow often takes precedence. The very title of Lee Daniels’s film Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire points viewers toward the original novel, but the great majority of viewers will never take the opportunity to compare film and text. They will never fully appreciate what was lost, gained, or rearranged, and they will never grasp where the narration has become dialogue or monologue. If the film is a major success, the cinematic visualization may become so dominant that the reader of the novel will lose the capacity to imagine the story. Staring at the written word, you will see the screen adaptation.

This will certainly be the case with Daniels’s visualization of the lead character of Sapphire’s novel—Claireece Precious Jones, who is portrayed (unforgettably) by Gabourey Sidibe. Harking back to the tradition of neorealist filmmakers like Vittorio De Sica (whose film Two Women is knowingly snippetted in Precious), Daniels cast an unknown with no professional acting experience. But Sidibe is more than an unfamiliar face. She mumbles, reluctantly makes eye contact, displays little expression and even less vocal dexterity. Sidibe doesn’t “portray” a character as much as embody her. Her performance isn’t an amazing piece of acting; it’s amazing for precisely giving the impression that she isn’t acting at all.

Gabourey Sidibe is surely one of the unlikeliest personages in American movie history. Call her big-boned, ample, bodacious, or plain fat, but her lead role in a major motion picture is in itself a critique of the one-dimensionality of Hollywood body images—which have become a parade of beautiful and handsome stars supposedly portraying alcoholics, drug addicts, or ordinary people. Precious is a depressed and abused sixteen years old, and Sidbe looks the part.

There she goes—in a movie poster that achieves a certain shock effect merely by brandishing Sidibie’s unfamiliar presence: sulky, head lowered, sneakers oversized. Sidibe’s physique is an image that beauty-conscious America works against. Her character seems to carry the burden of the extent to which society has belittled her. In the background of the poster hover a pair of butterfly wings, and a glorious imaginary crown tops Sidibe’s head. The earliest advertisements were captioned Life is Precious. Sentimental, yes, but a little is okay for a story that is so brutal and deadly.

PRECIOUS’S NARRATIVE adheres respectfully to Sapphire’s 1996 novel, which is set in Harlem, 1987. The illiterate Precious Jones attends overcrowded, failing public schools. She is sexually molested by her father and despised by her mother (played by comedian Mo’Nique). The movie begins with Precious realizing that she is pregnant with the second of two incestuous children, one of them cynically nicknamed “Mongo” (the child has Down syndrome). Mary Jones is a callous and indifferent mother, consumed by afternoon television and psychologically dependent upon welfare. It’s through the intervention of a concerned counselor that Precious leaves public school purgatory to begin attending the small Each One/Teach One program, where she bonds with her teacher, Ms. Blu Rain (played by an elegant Paula Patton). Rain urges Precious to enhance her opportunities by surrendering her children to adoption. Precious resists this idea, but at least succeeds in leaving her abusive domestic situation to reside in a girls’ home.

The movie has thus far been an artful tapestry of a young girls’ memories of sexual abuse, her fights at home, her vivid fantasy life (Precious fantasizes about being white and blonde or having the charmed life of a celebrity) and her burgeoning self-awareness that she is a valuable individual who has been victimized. Though Ms. Rain has helped her aspire toward middle-class respectability, Precious learns that her social program isn’t college-preparatory. It’s a workfare program that will enable her to become a fulltime nanny, at best. Blow follows blow. Precious learns that her father’s molestations have left her with the AIDS virus.

In the final scenes, Precious confronts her mother in a family counseling session.  Questioned about Precious’s abuse, Mary Jones delusionally pleads that she had to allow Precious’s rape by her father or else, “Who was gonna love me?” The film closes upon the image of Claireece Precious Jones hoisting the two incestuous children that she has finally gained custody of, her body language still ominously touched by self-abnegation but silently transformed. She has learned to read. She has learned to think.  She has become a woman and a mother. She aspires to raise two children on public assistance until she graduates from college, while she concurrently battles AIDS. In most, if not all these ambitions, she will probably fail.

Precious is loaded material, a difficult movie to judge fairly in a society with so many unresolved issues of race and racial stereotypes; poverty and images of poverty; sexism, sexual abuse, and silence. Is the immersion in all this justified? Ellison argued that film’s “shadows” are illusory representations of the forces and biases of social history, not history-making agents themselves. Cinema is an aesthetic reflection or reinterpretation of “acts.” Yet if the illusion is either “real” (“authentic” or conceived in verisimilitude) or maliciously distorted—which is Precious?

THOUGH PRECIOUS has won numerous awards and received Oscar nominations, many favorable reviews in the popular press have been characterized by a certain vagueness—as if reviewers have been hedging their bets, complimenting the film less out of enthusiasm than guilt, discomfort, or obligation. The film is too dark to permit reviewers to easily write off enjoying it, too explosive to permit any responsible critic to ignore it. When Precious has been reviewed negatively (not infrequently by black reviewers), the hostility has been vitriolic indeed.

The fiercest negative review by a black critic came from Armond White, an online reviewer and chair of the New York Film Critics Circle. White’s screed may overstate the case, but still serves usefully as an example of the emotional baggage this film dredges up and the stones that have been cast its way.

“Not since Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious. Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken) it is a sociological horror show. Offering racist hysteria masquerading as social sensitivity, it’s been acclaimed on the international festival circuit that usually disdains movies about black Americans as somehow inartistic and unworthy.” Translation: Precious has received artistic awards by playing upon feelings of racial guilt and superiority; its ethics are so debased that to gullible white audiences it looks progressive.  “[Lee Daniels] casts light-skinned actors as kind (schoolteacher Paula Patton, social worker Mariah Carey, nurse Lenny Kravitz and an actual Down syndrome child as Precious’ firstborn) and dark-skinned actors as terrors. Sidibe herself is presented as an animal-like stereotype—she’s so obese her face seems bloated into a perpetual pout.” Translation: Precious has been given a free pass because black people made it, but in actuality the film is “colorist.” Colorism is an intra-communal preference for lighter-skinned African Americans that is symptomatic of black self-hatred.

White’s analogy to Birth of a Nation is the cruelest slight of all. But it is also inexact. There were no educated blacks in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and anything but respect for progressive government programs. There is no celebration of the Ku Klux Klan in Precious. A stronger analogy for the phenomenon White describes would be Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestseller that decried chattel slavery. Her characters (or her audience’s simplistic appropriation of her characters) reinforced a century of patronizing images and attitudes; her book inspired both pity and indignation. In the same way, Precious decries poverty and oppression, but its characters—Precious, her neurotic mother, and her derelict father—are themselves pity machines.

Precious reinforces the idea that blacks are poor and will stay poor because poverty somehow suits them. Of course, Precious’s character in the movie is distinguished by her refusal to accept the narrative of self-destruction that has been mapped out for her, but White was perhaps blinded to that refusal by the potent emotionalism at the heart of one of Precious’s main subjects—the incest theme.

INCEST: THE pathetic and radical extreme of familial dysfunction. A shame beyond shames. Surely, on the Richter scale of black oppression narratives, incest trumps illiteracy, unemployment, the crack pipe, or the drive-by shooting. Ralph Ellison knew that. In Invisible Man, the poor, illiterate sharecropper Trueblood is discovered to have fathered a child by his daughter. He becomes the pariah of the community, but also the cause célèbre. The black community refuses to speak his name, while white men bribe him with food and sympathy simply to have him retell his grotesque story to shock and delight them. Invisible Man’s narrator thinks, “How can he tell this to white men? When he knows they’ll say that all Negroes do such things. I looked at the floor, a red mist of anguish before my eyes.” White wrote similarly, “Worse than Precious itself was the ordeal of watching it with an audience of patronizing white folk, then enduring its media hoodwink as a credible depiction of black life.” Perhaps the red mist was swimming in front of the embarrassed critic’s eyes.

Ellison was parodying both the white and black communities’ responses to Trueblood’s sinking to the bottom of the moral barrel. The Trueblood episode reveals that neither white nor black characters in Invisible Man can bring themselves to see beyond incest’s shock value. They refuse to view the situation from other than a racial and male-centric stance.  It should be intellectually possible to see a story like Precious first of all as a story of a young girl’s battle against sexual abuse (with marginal racial connotations), but White is overwrought by the idea that the movie might be taken as a brushstroke depiction of the whole black race (especially the lower classes).  Invisible Man’s Trueblood episode approaches the incest theme expressionistically, lacking much insight into actual sexual dynamics. But in recent works by black feminist writers such as Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker in The Color Purple, incest appears as a radical symbol for the chattel-like subjugation of women, and the theme is as much sexual and feminist as racial.

When compared to these books, Push is easily the frankest account of incest’s actual dynamics. Invisible Man is expressionistic. The Bluest Eye is so poetic that its language overwhelms the surface narrative. And even the staunchly feminist The Color Purple mutes the prosaic realities of sexual abuse as a result of its fairytale approach, which was later enhanced in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation.

This is ironic given how often Push and Precious have been denounced as tasteless since they may be the least manipulative of incest narratives. Push has been used by counselors of sexual abuse, rape, and incest victims.  Sapphire’s characters correspond to practical issues of family dysfunction. Precious’s mother, Mary Jones, for instance, is an abuse enabler who blames her daughter rather than her demented beau—a common feature of highly dysfunctional families.

PRECIOUS IS a brilliant film, but is probably best approached by looking at it alongside Push. The film can stand on its own merits; it creates an insular world—and within that world, the viewer can find a point of view and an overall significance. But while White mangles the movie, it has also not been well served by the host of critics who have penned nervously complimentary reviews. The film isn’t particularly complex. But incest is a difficult subject, and the film’s clarity might have been better advanced by beginning to understand it through Push.

Precious’s progenitor is a first-person narrative written like a diary. It’s arguable whether a film can really be told in the first person although the adaptation retains bits of the central character’s reflections through voice narration. Many of Sapphire’s prose jewels have been sacrificed—for example, this passage in which Precious comments on The Color Purple after her class has studied the novel under Rain’s tutelage. Sapphire is also wryly defending her own novel, anticipating the controversies Push was certain to provoke given her central character’s bleak circumstances.

Ms. Rain say one of the criticism of The Color Purple is it have fairy tale ending. I would say, well shit like that can be true. Life can work out for the best sometimes. Ms. Rain love Color Purple but say realism has its virtues. Izm, smizm! Sometimes I wanna tell Ms. Rain shut up with all the izm stuff. I don’t know what “realism” mean but I do know what reality is and it’s a motherfucker, lemme tell you.

This passage is spelled out in phonetic English, like all of Push, which is important to the novel’s impact. The phonetic English reflects Claireece Precious Jones’s thought process. She detests the crack dealers that litter her neighborhood, but “I loves Harlem, especially 125th Street. Lotta stuff here. You could see we got culchure.” She resists frank acknowledgment that she has been raped until midway through the book when she discovers an analogy she can grasp. “Seven, he on me almost every night. First, it’s just in my mouth. Then it’s more. He is intercoursing me...I think what my father do is what Farrakhan say the white man did to the black woman.”

Her poetic, if disjointed, slang is an index of her illiteracy and of her troubled relationship with society outside of her disastrous home life, and of her Harlem ghetto. Consequently, as Precious’s thinking becomes clearer, stronger, and self-willed, her writing improves. Language is a visceral sign tracing the limitations of her perspective. Because Push is situated so intimately within Precious’s consciousness—and the will to speak is the will to live—Push is first and foremost an incest survivor’s story.

The novel essentially takes place inside Precious’s mind, while the film renders her thoughts into images and dramatic scenes. The images (even when they’re depictions of a fantasy life) seem to portray a three-dimensional reality as tangible as a photograph. Daniels’s visualizations of the story lend greater force to a theme that is consistent with the novel, but less pronounced in it. The central characters in the movie are black; the controversies over the film have focused on its presentation of black life, depraved stereotypes, and colorism. But the subtext of the movie is the theme of whiteness—or how the social construction of whiteness has had its impact on life in a black ghetto. The film has objectified Precious’s world, and while her world is black, its psychological fixation is white. Precious, possibly like no film before it, shows how segregated and poor communities emotionally perceive blackness and poverty—how intensely they equate poverty and race.

There are few white characters in Precious, which reinforces the sense of whiteness as a talisman of power, privilege, or even dumb luck. Precious’s welfare-addicted mother curses her child, while The 25,000 Dollar Pyramid plays on the screen: white actors espousing far-fetched dreams, achievable in games of arguable skill or through the vagaries of chance. Near the end of the film, Mary Jones breaks down and pleads that she isn’t lovable: she isn’t white. Precious attends an alternative school program that seems to replicate college-prep in whiter “good” schools but, in fact, is geared toward workfare. “I wish I had a light-skinned boyfriend,” Precious says in both book and film. The reader will absorb the words in passing. Daniels has taken the relatively brief fantasy sequences in Push and created lengthy tableaus of Precious’s fantasies of success, beauty, and whiteness. The imagery is repeated to the point that Precious challenges its viewers to ask if on a visual and psychological level whiteness permeates their social reality, if this is a mere illusion and exaggeration or if such a vision of reality is reasonable—or possibly inevitable—within the peripheries of segregated poverty.

The film’s flaws—and it can be a crude film—derive from its uncompromising engagement with such volatile themes, particularly whiteness. The most justifiable criticism of the film is the one that comes closest to revealing its hidden psychological heart. Precious isn’t colorist in the sense of old-fashioned, intra-communal social snobbery, but Ms. Blu Rain (who isn’t physically described in the book) is light-skinned and lovely, and in the scenes between Sidibe and Patton it is clear that Daniels is playing with the color values of the actresses’ skin tones. Like many artists, he fathoms his theme intuitively rather than intellectually. Whiteness is a delicate subject to address in a visual entertainment—it’s easier in an academic paper. In this instance, Daniels’s film is visually striking but gratuitous; he is already jimmying open several Pandora’s boxes.

In general, the hysterical attacks on the movie take the same parochial stance as those that would view Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (a classic account of a provincial French girl’s exploitation) as a polemic against French rural life rather than a paean to a young girl’s fortitude and an indictment of all France. Neither incest nor familial dysfunction are racial themes; Precious shows how social illnesses—like medical illnesses—are exacerbated by ignorance and poverty. Precious also shows how the weight of whiteness—an intangible and insidious sense that society is ruled by white privilege—is a double burden upon the black poor.

It was a cliché, often repeated during the Obama campaign, that his election would prove to poor black children that they could ascend to the presidency; Precious is a film that looks behind this lovely idea to examine the economic forces and psychological detriments that make it an easier said than done. Precious is, in every sense, a film that pushes the country to eschew self-congratulation. The final moments in which Precious escapes from her wrecked home to begin her life on her own—accompanied by the audience’s near certainty that she will fail—is deeply touching, and Precious is easily one of the most important American films of the last thirty years.

 

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is a poet and cultural critic living in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

U.S. herpes rates remain high - CDC

Tue Mar 9, 2010 2:43pm EST

 

   

*1 in 6 Americans infected with herpes

 

*Highest rates found among blacks, women

 

 

 

By JoAnne Allen

 

WASHINGTON, March 9 (Reuters) - About 16 percent of Americans between the ages of 14 and 49 are infected with genital herpes, making it one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases, U.S. health officials said on Tuesday.

 

Black women had the highest rate of infection at 48 percent and women were nearly twice likely as men to be infected, according to an analysis by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

About 21 percent of women were infected with genital herpes, compared to only 11.5 percent of men, while 39 percent of blacks were infected compared to about 12 percent for whites, the CDC said.

 

There is no cure for genital herpes, or herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2), which can cause recurrent and painful genital sores and also increases the likelihood of acquiring and transmitting the AIDS virus. It is related to herpes simplex virus 1, or oral herpes, which causes cold sores.

 

Several drugs are available to treat herpes symptoms and outbreaks, including acyclovir, which is available generically or under the Zovirax brand name, and valacyclovir, known generically as Valtrex -- both made by GlaxoSmithKline PLC (GSK.L). Ganciclovir, sold as Zirgan, is made by privately-held Sirion Therapeutics, Inc.

The CDC estimates that more than 80 percent of people with genital herpes do not know they are infected.

"The message is herpes is quite common. The symptoms can be often very innocuous," Dr. John Douglas of the CDC said in a teleconference.

"Because herpes is so prevalent it becomes ... a really important reason to use condoms on a consistent and correct basis with all of your partners," Douglas said.

Douglas said the increased rate of infection in blacks is not do to increased risk behavior but likely due to biological factors that make women more susceptible as well as the higher rate of infection within black communities.

The CDC estimates that there are 19 million new sexually transmitted disease infections every year in the United States, costing the health care system about $16 billion annually.

(Editing by Paul Simao)

 

 

 

FILM: A PANTHER IN AFRICA

September 29, 2009 · Leave a Comment

 

The full film, about a Black Panther who fled Kansas City in the American Midwest in 1970 for a new life in Tanzania (by director Aaron Matthews), is now online.