Miguel performs acoustic

Tiny Desk Concert [Video]

By Nura Abdela

January 4, 2013

Still pedalling his sophomore album Kaleidoscope Dream, Miguel shows another side of himself as he performs a stripped back set for NPR Music as a part of their Tiny Desk Concert series, with just a microphone and an acoustic guitarist.

Away from the extravagant set ups and distractions that come with a concert environment, Miguel gets an oppurtunity to show off more of his personality and bring more emotions to the songs as he performs  “Do You…” and “The Thrill” as well as his Grammy-nominated runaway hit “Adorn.”

Just before he effortlessly serenades the girls in the room with “Adorn,” the LA-based singer-songwriter describes the song as being a truly important point in his career. “It’s been, thus far, a life-changing song for me,” he says. “I didn’t think [Adorn] was gonna connect to such a broad audience. It’s probably the song that got me here.” Check his stripped back live session out below.

 

 

Deadline for submission:  March 1, 2013 

 

The Kundiman Poetry Prize is dedicated to publishing exceptional work by Asian American poets.  
Winner receives $1,000, book publication with Alice James Books and a New York City feature reading.

Alice James Books is a cooperative poetry press with a mission is to seek out and publish the best contemporary poetry by both established and beginning poets, with particular emphasis on involving poets in the publishing process.

 

Eligibility

 

• Asian American writers living in the United States.

 

General Guidelines

• Reading period begins January 15

• Manuscripts must be typed, paginated, and 50 – 70 pages in length (single spaced).

• Individual poems from the manuscript may have been previously published in magazines, anthologies, or chapbooks of less than 25 pages, but the collection as a whole must be unpublished. Translations and self-published books are not eligible. No multi-authored collections, please.

• Manuscripts must have a table of contents and include a list of acknowledgments for poems previously published. The inclusion of a biographical note is optional. Your name, mailing address, email address and phone number should appear on the title page of your manuscript. 

• No illustrations, photographs or images should be included.

• The Kundiman Poetry Prize is judged by consensus of the members of Kundiman's Artistic Staff and the Alice James Books Editorial Board. Manuscripts are not read anonymously. Learn more about our judging process.

• Winners will be announced in June.

 

 

Guidelines for Electronic Manuscript Submission

 

 

Access the electronic submission application between January 15 and March 1.

 

 

 

Guidelines for Print Manuscript Submission

 

Should you wish to submit your manuscript via postal mail, mail your entry to:

Kundiman

P.O. Box 4248

Sunnyside, NY 11104

 

Send one copy of your manuscript submission with two copies of the title page. Use only binder clips. No staples, folders, or printer-bound copies.

MANUSCRIPTS CANNOT BE RETURNED. Please do not send us your only copy.

 

Entry fee is $28.  Checks or money orders should be made out to Alice James Books. On the memo line of your check, write The Kundiman Poetry Prize.

 

 

Checklist for print manuscript entry:

• One (1) copy of manuscript enclosed, with acknowledgements and two (2) copies of title page
• $28 entry fee
• Business sized SASE
• Stamped addressed postcard
• Postmarked between January 15 and March 1

 

 

Prize Events

For information on Prize Events, click here.

 

gqid:

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

Transcendence:

A Positive Trans*, Non-Binary,

and Genderqueer Fiction/Art Zine

Edited by Marilyn Roxie and Jacob Milnestein

Release Date: 1st Quarter/2nd Quarter 2013

 

As achievements in increased awareness of the spectrum of gender identities continue to be made, there is also a growing need for positive representation of trans*, non-binary, and genderqueer people in fiction and artwork; stories and images that can uplift and inspire those in the community, and enlighten our allies. The purpose of the Transcendence zine is to showcase the diversity of our identities and the varied ways in which we celebrate ourselves. We are currently seeking fiction and art submissions.

The zine will be also serve as an effort to generate interest for the anthology on the same topic we plan to release later on in 2013 - any submissions to the zine may be considered for the later anthology. The anthology, unlike the zine (which will be freely available online) will have a cost with all proceeds donated to a charity that works with the trans* community.

• Fiction Guidelines: Short stories - 4,000 to 8,000 word length. All genres welcome - seeking magic realism and speculative fiction in particular. Science fiction, historical, fantasy, straight lit are all acceptable, although perhaps it might be easier to steer away from direct horror due to the positive nature of the anthology. Please feel free to contradict this if you desire, whether it is through the the most breathtaking and life-affirming ‘Final Girl’ scenario within the context of a tale that deals with affirmation regarding gender, or another subversive approach.

• Art Guidelines: Art of uplifting nature (define positivity as you see fit) concerning trans*, non-binary, and/or genderqueer identity. The theme is entirely up to you. Art may be submitted along with or entirely independent of fiction piece.

• Fiction submissions: Submit your fiction work according to guidelines with a short bio and, if available, link to your website / online portfolio to gqid@mail.com as a .doc or .rtf attachment. with the subject TRANSCENDENCE ZINE SUBMISSION. Please include your author name and title of the piece. Content of text files should be presented in 12 point Times New Roman with 1 inch margins

• Art submissions: Submit your artwork according to guidelines with a short bio and, if available, link to your website / online portfolio to gqid@mail.com as a .jpg or .png attachment with the subject TRANSCENDENCE ZINE SUBMISSION. Please include your artist name and title of the piece, as well as any notes on medium or background information you may wish to include.

• The deadline to submit is January 20th, 2013. Authors and editors will not receive monetary compensation for their zine contribution - this will be a free release.

• Queries about the anthology can be directed to gqid@mail.com or tweeted to us @GenderqueerID on Twitter.

ABOUT THE EDITORS:

Marilyn Roxie blogs at Genderqueer Identities (http://genderqueerid.com/) and is a library tech and webmaster for the Center for Sex and Culture (http://sexandculture.org/) in San Francisco.

Jacob Milnestein writes stories. Like most people, he has a website.

CFP : ETHNICITY, RACE, AND PLACE IN

AFRICA AND THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

  

Posted on December 29, 2012 by sociolingo

Third Toyin Falola Annual International Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora (TOFAC 2013), July Monday 1 to Wednesday 3, 2013

Theme: ETHNICITY, RACE, AND PLACE IN AFRICA AND THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

Venue: Conference Centre, Lead City University, Ibadan, Nigeria

Arrival date: Sunday, June 30, 2013 Departure date: Thursday, July
4, 2013

TOFAC 2013 LEAD CITY UNIVERSITY, IBADAN [LCU] AND IBADAN CULTURAL STUDIES GROUP [ICSG]

CALL FOR PAPERS

Submission of Abstract, Due April 15th, 2013

ETHNICITY, RACE, AND PLACE IN AFRICA AND THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

While ethnicity has long been a staple analytical category of scholarly engagements on Africa and Africa-descended worlds, sparking rich, variegated conversations on its many referents and meanings, scholars of Africa and its vast diaspora have rarely conceptualized race as a stand-alone unit of Africanist analysis outside the familiar templates of colonial and neocolonial binaries, and outside of oppressive Euro-American racial formations such as apartheid, plantation slavery, and Jim Crow. Nor have they seriously considered how the emerging grid of place as a physical, imagined, and aspirational representation of self and the other might complicate notions of ethnic identity and racial awareness.

The conveners of the Toyin Falola Annual Conference (TOFAC) solicit abstracts that address one or more of our sub-themes from empirical and theoretical perspectives. Papers may use the subthemes as framing devices and as touchstones for exploring diverse African and African Diasporic realities either separately or as a cluster. Alternatively, they may explore concepts that derive from or catalyze racial imaginations, ethnic consciousness, and a fixed or dynamic sense of place. Our view of the broad theme is that it is at once elastic and restrictive, and that authors’ scholarly imaginations should define the parameters of how ethnicity, race, and place should be understood and how the epistemological relationship between all three can be posited.

Clearly, ethnicity is an expansive category. It encompasses a plethora of representational practices, textual productions, material cultures, symbols, aspirations, cultural retentions and mixtures, religious belief, and forms of political negotiation. These elements are individually or collectively mobilized to articulate a coherent narrative of identity and solidarity, however transient such a narrative may be. Taken together or unpacked for separate engagement, these constitutive elements of ethnicity offer the space for rich multidisciplinary analyses. They can foreground, and can be applied to, empirical and conceptual inquiries in many fields in the social sciences and the humanities. Although we welcome papers that address ethnicity and its corollaries from parochial disciplinary methodologies, we encourage authors to imagine a multidisciplinary audience for their papers and to cultivate analytical approaches that would spark cross-disciplinary conversations.

Scholars of Africa and of the African Diaspora spawned by slavery, colonialism, trade, exile, economic hardship, opportunity, adventure, and post-colonial migration, have yet to systematically grapple with the place of race, race consciousness, and constructions of racial communities and attributes in the evolution of African cultures and experiences around the world. Yet racial ideas, not just reactive ideas about racial solidarity, but proactively constructed notions of intra-racial difference have proliferated in the texts and conversations of global black elites, intellectuals, and black communities around the world. This development has in turn given political and social valence to ideas and debates about black authenticity, race treachery, racial integration and separatism, compromise and resistance, and even the philosophical implications of skin lightening, hair straightening, and other bodily practices among black folk. Differing understandings of racial destiny, black victimhood, black racial purity, and the intertwinement of authenticity and place of origin have become subjects of discussion in global black intellectual circles. Moreover, beyond the familiar analysis of the complex and at times difficult legacies of European-African, Asian-African, and Arab-African encounters and miscegenation in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the New World, recent studies have begun to unearth elaborate racial claims and narratives of racial differentiation within “African” communities and in “African” zones of contact previously narrated homogeneously into an African racial formation.

Some questions are already framing discussions of the role of race and racial constructs in the study of African communities around the world; questions about whether the Sahara, Indian Ocean, and certain sectors of the Red Sea constitute a racial divide that disturb the geographical continuum of Africa; whether Africa is a byword for “black” and if so what “black” means in light of its obvious exclusion of “white” Africans; whether the field of play between race and ethnicity is narrow or wide; whether we can posit intra-black racism as a phenomenon; whether a black racial essence exists that connects Africa to its diaspora and produces trans-oceanic communities of solidarity; whether continental Africans and diaspora Africans relate to race and racism differently and/or have
different racial imaginations that may engender intra-racial tensions; whether xenophobia and native/immigrant tensions are sustained by popular racial and ethnic stereotypes or are grounded in real differences within black communities; whether immigrant and native-born blacks can work together to pursue agendas specific to their common interests in white-dominated power structures like the United States; whether the fault lines of some conflicts in Africa correspond to a clichéd understanding of racial difference between Africans and Arabs; and whether intra-African racial claims are stand-ins for other aspirations or deserve to be understood on their own racial merits.

We encourage authors to propose papers that explore race, racial politics, and racial transformation in the context of Africa’s encounter with the world outside, in the context of oppression, in the context of the racialization of ethnic difference, in the context of post-slavery and emancipation, and in the context of identity construction in response to colonial and postcolonial policies of differentiation and privilege.

Our conception of place ties in with the provocative outlines articulated above on race and ethnicity. We understand place to be a physical, mental, and ideological location or situation in which significant sociopolitical, economic, and emotional investments have been made. These investments often define the contours of identity, serving as anchors and referents for a variety of identity practices, including racial and ethnic self-representation. We acknowledge, however, that “place,” its connotations, and the semiotic burdens it is often called upon to bear are always changing. We therefore welcome papers that radically redefine “place,” “home,” “location,” “origin,” and related idioms of affiliation and affinity.

Finally, we encourage ambitious proposals that bring our three subthemes into productive and insightful dialogue. The choice of doing this through empirical inquiry or conceptual reflections or both lies with the author.

Abstracts may investigate and explore one or more of the following topics:

• Ethnic Associations
• Ethnic Nationalism
• Language Politics
• Ethnicity and Colonization
• Ethnicity and slavery
• Ethnicity and slave culture
• Ethnicity and slave religion
• Politicized Ethnicity
• Ethnic Politics
• Ethnic Literatures
• Ethno-religious imaginations
• Ethno-religious violence
• Ethno-religious communities
• Linguistic politics
• Language and ethnic solidarity
• Ethnicity and civil war
• Ethnicity and electoral contest
• Ethnic cleansing
• Genocide
• Civil war
• Racial authenticity
• Intra-racial tensions
• Racialization of difference
• Arabs and Africans
• Afro-Arab solidarity and conflict
• Berber identity/nationalism
• Tuareg identity/nationalism
• African-Diasporan tensions
• Intra-racial stereotypes
• Racial Writings
• Racial representations
• Race and African identity
• Racism
• Racial mixture
• Miscegenation
• Luso-African communities
• Mixed race communities and social consciousness
• Racial revolutions
• Afrocentrism
• Black power
• Black nationalism
• Black separatism
• Race and ethnicity
• Race and religion
• Race and Pan-Africanism
• Racial origins
• Race and civilization
• Nilo-centric theories
• Ancient Egypt in Africa
• Race in Ancient Africa
• Afro-Arab borderlands
• Xenophobia in Africa
• White Africa
• Apartheid and Post-Apartheid
• Home Exile (or Self Alienation)
• Exile-Exile (or Alienated Exile)
• Exilic Experience
• Origins
• Ancestry
• Local and global identities
• Rural and urban spaces
• Consciousness
• Spatial identities
• Territorial struggles
• Land politics
• Displacement and dispossession
• Refugees
• Domesticity
• Gendered space
• Mobility and migration
• Orientalism
• New Diaspora – Africa in China, etc
• Religious pilgrimage
• Changing concepts of home
• Generational dynamics

Participants will be drawn from different parts of the world. Graduate students are encouraged to attend and present papers. The conference will provide time for scholars from various disciplines and geographical locations to interact, exchange ideas, and receive feedback. Submitted papers will be assigned to particular panels according to similarities in theme, topic, discipline, or geographical location. Additionally, selected papers will be published in book form.

The deadline for submitting abstracts/proposals of not more than 250 words, is April 15, 2013. It should include the title, the author’s name, mailing address, telephone number, email address, and institutional affiliation. Abstracts should be saved with the author’s names as it appears on the abstract. Please submit all abstracts to the following:

http://www.ibadanculturalstudiesgroup.org/toyinfalolaconference/user/register

* *

Professor Ademola Dasylva e-mail: dasylvang@yahoo.com

a.dasylva@ibadanculutralstudiesgroup.org

All inquiries should be directed to Dr. Mrs Doyin Aguoru,
Mobile phone: +234(0)703 504 7854

E-mail: doyinaguoru77@yahoo.com

For regular update on the conference information visit:
ibadanculturalstudiesgroup.org/toyinfalolaconference

A mandatory non-refundable registration fee (ICSG/TOFAC administrative charges) of ten thousand Naira (N10, 000) (for participants from Nigeria and other African countries) and $100 (for participants from USA, Europe, and Asia) must be paid immediately an abstract is accepted. The Registration fee covers conference bag, tag, jotter and biro, lunch and tea/coffee break throughout the conference duration.

Accommodation: i) LCU Guest House; ii) Hotels

TOFAC 2013 HOST, LEAD CITY UNIVERSITY has graciously made available some rooms from its Guest House, gratis, to registered participants: 25 rooms for registered participants from US, Europe, Asia. 20 rooms for registered participants from Africa, including Nigeria, on first-register-first-served basis. However, they will be responsible for breakfast, which the Catering department will be too willing to provide on request.

For other participants who are unable to make the LCU-free-guest rooms list, there are two options:
i) LCU has a few rooms available in the students’ hostels (some single rooms, some shared rooms) that can accommodate about a hundred participants at a token fee each, on request;
ii) hotel rooms are available for other participants who may prefer to stay in near-by hotels at very friendly and negotiated charges where they can be conveyed by the conference vans on arrival. Married couples shall be encouraged to stay together in a room. Joint authors, unless they register separately, will be entitled to a lunch plate, a pack of conference materials, and a single room (for joint-authors), provided they register early enough to qualify for LCU guest rooms.

Airport Pick-up Logistics:

Arrangement for the Airport pick up is currently being perfected for participants from US, Europe, Asia and other parts of Africa (not participants from Nigeria). Although there will be airport pick up arrangement for Saturday, Sunday and Monday, for this category of participants, they are advised, where possible or practicable, to make their arrival to Murtala Mohammed Airport, Lagos, Nigeria to coincide with the conference arrival date of Sunday, 30 June, 2013.

It is expected that all participants will raise the funding for their air-ticket/transportation to attend the conference.

Keynote Speakers:

Prof. Moses Ochonu, Vanderbilt University
Prof. Ken Harrow, Michigan State University
Publication of Peer-reviewed papers: Africa World Press and the Carolina Academic Press will publish the best papers selected from the conference.

Please visit TOFAC website
www.ibadanculturalstudiesgroup.org/toyinfalolaconference regularly, for update on further information on TOFAC 2013.

TOFAC Representatives in the United States:

Ms. Lady Jane Acquah l.jane26@hotmail.com
Prof. Julius Adekunle (jadekunl@monmouth.edu)

TOFAC/ICSG LOC Members:

Prof. Ademola O. Dasylva, Redeemer’s University, Mowe, Ogun State, Nigeria (TOFAC Board Chairman and Convener)

Prof. Ayo Olukotun, Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences and Entreneurial Studies, Lead City University, Ibadan.

Dr. Doyin Aguoru, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye, Ogun State, Nigeria.

Dr. Mark Ighile, Redeemer’s University, Mowe, Ogun State, Nigeria

Dr. Anya Egwu, Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State, Nigeria.

THE TOFAC BOARD

–
Lady Jane Acquah.

Interview:

daughter of Frantz Fanon

on Palestine solidarity

Adri Nieuwhof
The Electronic Intifada

22 April 2011

Last year, Mireille Fanon-Mendes France of the Frantz Fanon Foundation testified in the trial of Ameer Makhoul, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and the director of Ittijah, the Union of Arab Community-Based Associations. In January, Makhoul was sentenced to nine years in prison for charges related to espionage and contact with “enemies of the state.” According to Makhoul, during the 22 days he was held in isolation after his arrest, the Israeli authorities used severe interrogation methods that caused him both psychological and physical harm.

Mireille Fanon-Mendes France knows Ameer Makhoul through years of regular meeting while representing their respective organizations at the World Social Forum’s International Council.

The Frantz Fanon Foundation is named for Fanon-Mendes France’s father, the celebrated black psychiatrist, thinker, activist and writer originating from Martinique. Fanon was deeply involved in popular struggles against racism, colonialism and oppression. He supported the Algerian struggle for independence and became a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. The Frantz Fanon Foundation aims to promote Fanon’s ideas worldwide.

The Electronic Intifada contributor Adri Nieuwhof interviewed Fanon-Mendes France about her involvement in the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

Adri Nieuwhof: How would you like to introduce yourself ?
 

Mireille Fanon-Mendes France: I have been very active in the solidarity work with Palestine for a long time, since 1967. I have worked on the issue of Palestinian prisoners since the first intifada but I was more involved during the second intifada, when I went several times [to the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip] and wrote a report on this issue.

Furthermore, I assume the presidency of the Frantz Fanon Foundation working on the actuality of thoughts of Frantz Fanon [on] colonialism and domination, racism, alienation and emancipation, on the right of people to self-determination. I am also on the board of the French Jewish Union for Peace. And I am me.

AN: Why did you get involved in the movement in solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people ?

M F-M F: My first involvement was against racism. I’ve worked for a long time on human rights. Then I understood the most important right is the right to self-determination for all peoples. In fact, this right is complementary to the right for states to choose their own political representatives, and the right to use and benefit from their own natural resources.

Since the beginning, I have been very concerned about what self-determination means for peoples. And what it means for governments, the international community and the solidarity movement. I tried to understand why it was so difficult to claim this fundamental right. Later, when I studied international law, the right of self-determination was my main focus. This right is the result of the decolonization and the victory of the states that met in Bandung in 1955 [which paved the way for the Non-Alignment Movement]. If there is one people in the world who cannot obtain this right, we have to push, to act, so that it is realized. The Palestinian people have not obtained their right to self-determination and the international community tries its best [to ensure] that this right is not achieved. That is why I am involved.

AN: You were a witness in a hearing in the case against Ameer Makhoul. What is your view on how Israel dealt with Ameer Makhoul’s trial ?

M F-M F: I was once in court in Haifa as a character witness for Ameer Makhoul. It was a hearing. I was very surprised about the court case against Ameer Makhoul; I’ve known him for a long time. I went to Ittijah in 2003. I had the opportunity to get to know him better during our meetings with the World Social Forum that took place every six months.

Many people know Ameer. I am very impressed by him; I find him trustworthy. He is inclusive in his approach. I was very proud to be his character witness. It was a very difficult test for me; it was a heavy responsibility. It was not about my own life but for his life and his family. About the trial, I would say that I know how they [Israel] arrange the law, and I know how they get a signature under a confession. He was treated badly [in detention], deprived of sleep and kept in a bad position for a long time. Unfortunately, I understand why he signed. I know he was not capable to do what he admitted in his confession.

He was denied the right to a fair trial. They use this horrible procedure called a plea bargain. If we could “use” Ameer as a symbolical example of a political prisoner it would be great. He is a Palestinian prisoner from Israel. There is always violation of rights of Palestinians from Israel. We have to denounce this racist and xenophobic treatment of Palestinians by Israel. We have to denounce Israel’s violations of human rights conventions and international political conventions. We don’t have to accept the apartheid system used by the Israeli government against the Palestinians living inside Israel.

AN: The call for an international campaign for the release of Palestinian political prisoners is becoming louder. What is your opinion on such a campaign ?

M F-M F: All the political prisoners are in jail for political reasons. Some are held [without charge] under administrative detention, and the period of detention could be extended over and over again. It is against international law. Together, we have to work to do what is possible on this issue, and even more, because it is one of the war crimes committed by Israel. To be held in jail in Israel as a Palestinian political prisoner from the occupied [West Bank and Gaza Strip] is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention; it is a grave breach.

They [Israel] have to be sued for this at the level of the International Criminal Court. As state parties to the Geneva conventions did not do this, we can ask questions about these states, because they don’t live up to their obligations. In 2004, the International Court of Justice in the Hague ruled in its Advisory Opinion on the wall that state parties have the obligation to respect the Fourth Geneva Convention, and also ensure the respect for the convention. State parties leave Israel to continue its violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention. They did not ask for sanctions, not in the UN General Assembly or in the Security Council. State parties are accountable. By not acting, they become complicit in Israel’s war crimes.

AN: What do you consider as a critical contribution for international solidarity organizations and concerned citizens to support the Palestinian people in achieving their goals ?

M F-M F: A lot of things need to be done. We cannot do what we want without the agreement and support of the Palestinian movement. For me, we have to push the international community, to see how we can ask the international community why they don’t respect their obligations to international law. Why are they allowing war crimes daily?

What it is doing in Libya is symptomatic. The international community seeks its own goal. Not the obligations and the respect of international law toward all the nations. Some of the states use the law of the stronger, the law of the jungle, or the law of the hegemony of some of them. They want a world that is one side that is “good,” and another side that is “bad.” In this world vision, Palestinians are the “bad” people, and people who support the Palestinians are “bad” people too. We have to ask our governments to act responsibly and stop the Israeli war crimes. We should hold our governments, as state parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention, to account for their complicity in Israeli war crimes at the International Criminal Court.

We should use both national law and international law in our activism. For example, in the legal action in France against [French transportation giant] Veolia for its complicity in the Jerusalem light rail project, the company has been sued under national law, the French Civil Code. We could also sue the French government at the International Criminal Court for allowing a French company to be complicit in war crimes.

And as a solidarity movement, we should work at these two levels, national and international. The same counts for the boats to Gaza. I would prefer an international flotilla of boats from several nations. We have to work together to achieve the right of self-determination for all peoples, the right of peoples to use their natural resources. We have to respect the choice of the people. We are not working for ourselves. We want to uplift humanity.

Photo courtesy of Mireille Fanon-Mendes France.
Adri Nieuwhof is a consultant and human rights advocate based in Switzerland.

Visit the website http://www.hermanshousethefilm.com
Like the Facebook fan pagehttp://www.facebook.com/HermansHouseTheFilm
Follow the film on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/HermansFilm

What kind of house does a man who has been imprisoned in a 6' x 9' cell for over 37 years dream of? Black Panther Herman Wallace works with artist Jackie Sumell to build his dream home while challenging injustice in America's prisons.

Herman’s House

by Vox Staff on March 2, 2012

By Hannah Spaar

Photo courtesy of True/False Film Fest

In Herman’s House, Herman Wallace owns little more than his voice and a dream.

Wallace is one of more than 80,000 prisoners in solitary confinement in the United States and out of all of them, has spent the most time there. It is Wallace’s 40th year in solitary confinement at Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola. This has gone unbroken except for an 8-month stint in a dormitory area which is the time documented in the film Herman’s House.

This film follows a New York artist named Jackie Sumell as she developes her art exhibit “The House that Herman Built.” She then attempts to find land in New Orleans to build Wallace’s dream house as more than just the model used in her exhibit.

Lisa Vallencia-Svensonn, the film’s producer, says during the Q&A after the film that it is a movie about a dream.

Herman’s House also delves into solitary confinement as a policy and touches on wider problems with the justice system. It goes through Wallace’s history and shows that Wallace might have been wrongfully convicted of murder. In one of the most poignant remarks in the film, Sumell says that her film work is driven by equal parts love and anger.

The film’s director Angad Bhalla said he realized early on that the dream house would not be built, at least not in Wallace’s time frame. Therefore, setting up an arc and compensating for the lack of access to Wallace were his two largest obstacles. Bhalla was only able to receive 15-minute phone calls from Wallace in prison, but they were not daily or scheduled.

Despite this, other visuals were handled wonderfully. Archival footage from the world before Wallace was incarcerated in the ’70s is shown generated onto the walls of the wooden replica of his six-by-nine foot prison cell from “The House that Herman Built.” Scenery is sometimes used as well, a mixture of inside and outside that shows just how different Wallace’s life is inside his prison cell.

Homes, and the roles they play, were prominent throughout the documentary. Wallace’s dream house obviously played a large role. They plan it as a community center for children while he is in prison. Wallace’s sister Vickie takes Sumell to the their childhood home in New Orleans. Sumell returns to her own childhood home during the film. Her new house in New Orleans is shown at the end. It is a beautiful home in a run-down neighborhood.

At the end of the movie, as the audience sees an aerial shot of Louisiana State Penitentiary for the first time, an instrumental version of “Over the Rainbow” plays. They are reminded that there really is no place like home.

Overall, it is a well-done film that asks tough questions of all parties and includes striking cinematography and two very headstrong, enjoyable characters. Although it loses its strong pace halfway through and the circumstances frustratingly circle back to the beginning by the end, the film convincingly portrays the real struggle of a real man and real woman for an imaginary home.

Worsening wealth inequality

by race

By Tami Luhby @CNNMoney June 21, 2012

 

The Great Recession has widened the wealth gap, and race is a major factor.

 

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- White Americans have 22 times more wealth than blacks -- a gap that nearly doubled during the Great Recession.

The median household net worth for whites was $110,729 in 2010, versus $4,995 for blacks, according to recently released Census Bureau figures.

The difference is similarly notable when it comes to Hispanics, who had a median household net worth of $7,424. The ratio between white and Hispanic wealth expanded to 15 to 1.

The gap between the races widened considerably during the recent economic downturn, which whites weathered better than blacks, Hispanics and Asians.

The latter three groups saw their median household net worth fall by roughly 60% between 2005 and 2010, while the median net worth for white households slipped only 23%.

This allowed whites to leap ahead of Asians as the race with the highest median household net worth.

CNN iReport: Are you feeling the drop in net worth?

The racial wealth divide is nothing new. Black and Hispanic Americans have historically had lower incomes, higher unemployment and less education.

That makes it more difficult for these groups to save money and put their capital to work building wealth, said Tatjana Meschede, research director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University.

The Great Recession exacerbated the problem. In 2005, the net worth difference wasn't quite as stark. Whites had 12 times more wealth than blacks and 8 times more than Hispanics.

The main reason blacks and Hispanics did not fare as well during the economic downturn is that home equity makes up more of their wealth than it does for whites. The housing bubble that preceded the collapse pushed up homeownership rates among blacks and Hispanics, who relied more heavily on high-cost subprime loans to finance their purchases.

As a result, the implosion of the real estate market had a more devastating impact on black and Hispanic communities.

Asians, meanwhile, are more concentrated on the West Coast, which was hit harder by the mortgage meltdown. And the arrival of new Asian immigrants in the last decade contributed to the decline in overall wealth, according to Rakesh Kochhar, co-author of the Pew Research Center report on wealth.

Pew found that in 2005, home equity made up nearly two-thirds of the net worth of Hispanics and 59% of blacks, but only 44% of whites.

Blacks and Hispanics are also less likely to have assets in the financial system, such as savings accounts or stocks, Kochhar said.

And these groups also suffer from far higher unemployment rates than whites, whose unemployment rate is 7.4%, below the national average. Blacks, on the other hand, have a 13.6% unemployment rate and Hispanics, 11%.

The widened wealth chasm could have major ramifications going forward, experts said.

Having less wealth and home equity means it will be more difficult for blacks and Hispanics to send their children to college, which gives them a leg up on landing good jobs, said Roderick Harrison, senior research scientist at Howard University. That will further extend the wealth gap.

"The implications will be with us into the next generation, which will have greater difficulty in getting the kinds of jobs needed to start saving and building wealth," Harrison said. 

 

Welcome to the new Civil War

Lincoln's unfinished war rages on, as the neo-Confederacy tries to turn back the clock on women, gays, God and guns

BY ANDREW O'HEHIR

"LINCOLN"..L-001131R..Daniel Day Lewis stars as President Abraham Lincoln in this scene from director Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" from DreamWorks Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox...Ph: David James, SMPSP..©DreamWorks II Distribution Co., LLC. †All Rights Reserved. (Credit: David James, Smpsp)

On a repeat viewing of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” over the New Year’s holiday, a scene I had barely noticed the first time jumped out at me. Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens (played with reptilian gentility by Jackie Earle Haley), in a secret meeting aboard a steamboat with Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, faces up to the reality that the era of slavery has come to an end. Ratification of the 13th Amendment, Stephens muses, will destroy the basis of the Southern economy and the South’s traditional way of life. “We won’t know ourselves anymore,” he says.

If only it had been so. What an affluent slaveowner like Stephens feared most, no doubt, was the utopian vision of “radical Reconstruction” imagined by legendary abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones in the movie), in an earlier conversation with Lincoln in the White House kitchen. Stevens envisioned a future in which all the land and property of the Southern aristocracy would be dispossessed and divided among the emancipated slaves, building a new society of free soil and free labor amid the ruins of tyranny. To put it in contemporary social-studies terms, Stevens hoped that by uprooting and destroying the South’s slave economy, one could also replace its culture.

It didn’t quite work out that way. You can’t boil one of the most tumultuous periods of American history down to one paragraph, but here goes: Lincoln was assassinated by a domestic terrorist and replaced by Andrew Johnson, who was an incompetent hothead and an unapologetic racist. Within a few years the ambitious project of Reconstruction fell victim to a sustained insurgency led by the Ku Klux Klan and similar white militia groups. By the late 1870s white supremacist “Redeemers” controlled most local and state governments in the South, and by the 1890s Southern blacks had been disenfranchised and thrust into subservience positions by Jim Crow laws that were only slightly preferable to slavery.

So even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true. We’re still reaping the whirlwind from that long-ago conflict, and now we face a new Civil War, one focused on divisive political issues of the 21st century – most notably the rights and liberties of women and LGBT people – but rooted in toxic rhetoric and ideas inherited from the 19th century.

We’ve just emerged from a presidential campaign that exposed how hardened our political and cultural divide has become, and how poorly the two sides understand each other. Part of the Republican problem, in an election that party thought it would win easily, was that those who felt a visceral disgust toward both the idea and the reality of President Barack Obama simply could not believe that they didn’t represent a majority. As many Republicans are now aware, the party now faces an existential crisis. It’s all very well to go on TV and talk about attracting Latinos and downplaying cultural wedge issues. But the activist core of the Republican Party is neo-Confederate, whether it thinks of itself that way or not. It isn’t interested in common cause with Mexicans or turning down the moral thermostat. Just ask Rick Santorum: What it wants is war.

In the recent “fiscal cliff” negotiations, which ended (of course) in yet another short-term stopgap measure, most congressional Republicans, having sworn a blood oath never to raise taxes on their millionaire patrons, were content to let the nation slide into chaos and catastrophe rather than reach a compromise with the president they have consistently depicted as a socialist renegade or alien interloper. It was like a third-rate farcical reprise of the great congressional struggle depicted by Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner in “Lincoln,” when the defeated and embittered Democrats of 1864 fought a rear-guard action to defend slavery, in defiance of not just history, morality and basic human decency but also tactical judgment and common sense.

Thanks to Lincoln’s great political victory in that Congress, slavery has faded into the history books — maybe too much so. As the controversy over Quentin Tarantino’s slave-revenge western “Django Unchained” demonstrates, it still isn’t a history we know how to talk about. It may seem melodramatic to claim that the curse of slavery hangs over us still, but Lincoln himself clearly foresaw that possibility, as his slaveowning predecessor Thomas Jefferson had before him. In Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, he described slavery as an offense against God, and the bloodshed of the Civil War “as the woe due to those [on both sides] by whom the offense came.” Perhaps a cruel cosmic justice was now being extracted, he concluded, and the war would go on “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”

I’m not sure America ever paid that debt, in blood or money or any other currency. The lingering effects of our racist history – from the resegregation of our public schools to the enduring and astonishing “wealth gap” between whites and blacks – are national problems, not just Southern problems. Our new Civil War is infused with the undead spirit of the old one and waged by a rebellious neo-Confederacy rooted in the states of the Old South, but its influence can be felt, as with the pro-slavery forces of the 1860s, in every part of the country. (Fernando Wood, the fiery pro-slavery Democrat played by Lee Pace in “Lincoln,” was a former mayor of New York.)

The new Civil War is not entirely or even principally about race, although there’s no mistaking its pernicious racial component. Even making allowances for Bobby Jindal and Allen West, the neo-Confederate forces are perhaps 99 percent white, in a nation whose fastest-growing demographic groups are neither white nor black. While the issues of the new Civil War are contemporary, its rhetoric is ancient and all too familiar, from states’ rights and resistance to Washington to claims of a special relationship with the Almighty and vague appeals to distinctive “cultural traditions,” employed as a justification for bigotry and oppression.

While the Civil War of the 1860s really was about slavery first and foremost – it was the foundation of the Southern economy, and had concentrated immense wealth in the hands of a small landowning caste – the true subject matter of the new Civil War is much less clear. Abortion and same-sex marriage play a crucial role, to be sure (and we may soon see guns and marijuana enter the picture as well). Those are symbolic issues that reflect larger social tensions around gender roles, sexuality and the “war on women,” but they are not just symbolic issues. Many people on the neo-Confederate side see abortion and Adam-and-Steve marriage as moral outrages or offenses against God, to borrow Lincoln’s phrasing, which must be stopped at almost any cost. Of course, pro-choice activists and marriage-equality advocates see those issues as matters of basic economic justice, guaranteeing to all people the kind of basic personal autonomy that men take for granted, or the common-law legal and medical rights that heterosexual married couples have long enjoyed.

We appear to be moving into an unstable Missouri Compromise period of American history, in which regional tiers of states adopt sharply different policies on reproductive rights and marriage rights in particular, but also seem locked into fixed political identities and differing views on fundamental questions of national identity and the national future. Within the past week, we saw Illinois and Rhode Island – core “neo-Union” states, if you will – move closer to legalizing gay marriage, while the Republican governors of Michigan and Virginia (exactly the kind of “border states” where these battles are being fought on the ground) snuck new restrictions on abortion through the legal back door.

If you correlate the states where both same-sex marriage and same-sex civil unions have been banned and the states with the harshest restrictions on abortion, you begin to measure the breadth of the neo-Confederacy: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah. Most (but not all) are onetime Southern slave states and hotbeds of evangelical Christianity, and most (but not all) coincide with the familiar red-blue split between Republicans and Democrats. The battleground states of the moment, on these issues as on many others, are strikingly familiar: Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. All four are currently in the grip of neo-Confederate forces on a state level, and all four have enacted gay-marriage bans and abortion restrictions, even though Obama won them all in both of his election campaigns.

Do I even need to mention that none of the neo-Confederate states are in the Northeast or on the West Coast, regions where abortion remains widely available and same-sex marriage is rapidly becoming routine? Or that the neo-Confederate states of the South and the Plains States have sent nearly all of the intransigent, anti-taxation Tea Party members to Congress, while the neo-Union states of the East and West, with their polyglot, immigrant-rich populations, have elected few or none?

Ultimately, the Missouri Compromise collapsed (as did the short-lived Compromise of 1850 that followed it), tearing the nation apart and forcing a long overdue reckoning with the enormous evil of slavery.. We are heading toward a similar reckoning now. Secession is no longer an option (although many, on both sides, might wish it were), so the new Civil War is not likely to involve pitched battles in the meadows of Pennsylvania, or hundreds of thousands of dead. Today’s fights over abortion and gays and God and guns have a profound moral dimension, but don’t quite have the world-historical weight of the slavery question. As with slavery, however, it’s tough to imagine any viable long-term middle ground. At the moment, two women who get married in Iowa will have no legal relationship if they move to Kansas, and a teenage girl in Seattle can easily get a safe and legal abortion while her cousin in Dallas faces mandatory counseling, a 24-hour waiting period and a parental consent law. (If they have another cousin in rural Mississippi, she probably won’t find legal abortion services under any terms.)

Regardless of how you feel about those issues, that’s nuts. No nation-state can function indefinitely on that kind of patchwork-quilt basis. Then again, this is the United States of America, land of semi-permanent political paralysis, so “functional” doesn’t really apply. It’s tempting to call upon history and proclaim that the only possible outcome of this new Civil War, after many years of ugly politics and occasional outbreaks of craziness and violence, will resemble the outcome of the last one: the continued expansion of constitutional rights and freedoms and the final defeat of the Confederate strain in American political and cultural life. But other, darker outcomes are definitely possible, and I suspect that as long as we’ve got a country, the Confederacy will still be with us.

Dying for Freedom

By JIM DOWNS

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

The Emancipation Proclamation, which Abraham Lincoln signed on Jan. 1, 1863, was primarily a military tool. When he issued it in preliminary form in September 1862, it was meant to be a warning to the South: give up, or your slaves will be set free.

And, once in place, emancipation did just what Lincoln wanted — it drew untold thousands of freed slaves to the advancing Union armies, depleting the Southern work force and providing the North with much-needed cheap labor. But it also created an immense humanitarian crisis in which hundreds of thousands of former slaves died from disease, malnutrition and poverty.

Emancipation did, of course, free the slaves in the Confederacy. But Lincoln can no longer be portrayed as the hero in this story. Despite his efforts to end slavery, his emancipation policies failed to consider the human cost of liberation.

 

Corbis / A group of freed slaves who worked as laborers and servants with the 13th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment in the Civil War.

Little if any thought was given to what would happen to black people after emancipation. Questions about where they would go, what they would eat, how they would work and, most important, how they would survive the war were not considered, either by policy makers in Washington or the majority of generals in the field.

Amazingly, the overwhelming flow of men, women and children out of their bonds and toward Union lines seemed to take Northern military and political leaders by surprise. As O. O. Howard, a leading military official, later described the period after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, “The sudden collapse of the rebellion, making emancipation an actual, universal fact, was like an earthquake. It shook and shattered the whole previously existing social system.”

As former slaves left their places of servitude behind, they entered a world of freedom, but also a war zone devastated by disease, poverty and death. More soldiers, as Ric Burns’s recent documentary, “Death and the Civil War,” reveals, died of disease than from battle. Slaves became exposed to the same outbreaks of dysentery, smallpox and fever that decimated Union and Confederate ranks, and they died by the thousands: an estimated 60,000 former slaves died from a smallpox epidemic from 1863 to 1865.

There were no protections, no refugee programs or public health services, in place to help freed slaves ward off the disease that plagued the Confederate South. As one 19th-century reformer observed, “You may see a child well and hearty this morning, and in the evening you will hear of its death.”

Without a proper place to live, adequate nutrition or access to basic medical necessities, freed slaves became more vulnerable to illness than Union soldiers, and as a result, hundreds of thousands of slaves became sick and died at the moment of freedom — a bitter irony often ignored in favor of a more triumphant narrative about emancipation.

Because of the unexpected mortality that the freed slave population endured during the war, federal officials eventually established the first national health care system in 1865, after the war ended. Known as the Medical Division of the Freedmen’s Bureau, this institution included 40 hospitals, a dozen orphanages and homes for the elderly; employed roughly 120 physicians; and treated over a million freed slaves between 1865 and 1868.

But the government’s interest in providing medical support resulted less from a benevolent concern to treat the sick and suffering and more from an investment in creating a healthy labor force to return to the plantation South. Consequently, many of these hospitals remained underfinanced and understaffed and were unable to mitigate the medical crises that enveloped the postwar South.

 As the nation continues to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, we must remember that even though we celebrate emancipation as the end of chattel slavery, the policies that enacted it were failures. The inadequacies of the measures and the troubling motivations for these proclamations meant that countless numbers of freed slaves did not survive the war, despite the rhetoric employed to free them.

In 1863, a freed slave fled from a plantation to Washington. But once in the nation’s capital, a reformer later reported, he did not dance in the streets and sing of jubilee. Instead, like so many, he was suddenly ill, and he was confined to a bed in a crowded hospital. As he struggled to raise his head above a raggedy blanket and scanned the room that was full of other suffering former slaves, he asked, “Is this freedom?”

Lincoln’s emancipation may have legally freed that man, and nearly four million other slaves, but that was about it. Without the basic necessities of life — food, shelter and health — the prospect of freedom was but a hollow, half-fulfilled promise.

---

Jim Downs is an associate professor of history at Connecticut College and the author of “Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction.”

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

NINA SIMONE

 

Nina is song. Not just a vocalist or singer, but actual song. The physical vibration and the meaning too. A reflection and projection of a certain segment of our mesmerizing ethos. Culturally specific in attitude, in rhythm, in what she harmonizes with and what she clashes against, merges snugly into and hotly confronts in rage. All that she is. Especially the contradictions and contrarinesses. And why not. If Nina is song. Our song. She would have to be all that.

 

Nina is not her name. Nina is our name. Nina is how we call ourselves remade into an uprising. Eunice Waymon started out life as a precocious child prodigy -- amazingly gifted at piano. She went to church, sang, prayed and absorbed all the sweat of the saints: the sisters dropping like flies and rising like angels all around her. Big bosoms clad in white. Tambourine-playing, cotton-chopping, tobacco-picking, corn-shucking, floor-mopping, child-birthing, man-loving hands. The spray of sweat and other body secretions falling on young Eunice's face informing her music for decades to come with the fluid fire of quintessential Black musicking. But there was also the conservatory and the proper way to approach the high art of music. The curve of the hands above the keyboard. The ear to hear and mind to understand the modulations in and out of various keys. The notes contained in each chord. She aspired to be a concert pianist. But at root she was an obeah woman. With voice and drum she could hold court for days, dazzle multitudes, regale us with the splendor, enrapture us with the serpentine serendipity of her black magic womanistness articulated in improvised, conjured incantations. "My daughter said, mama, sometimes I don't understand these people. I told her I don't understand them either but I'm born of them, and I like it." Nina picked up Moses' writhing rod, swallowed it and now hisses back into us the stories of our souls on fire. Hear me now, on fire.

 

My first memory of Nina is twofold. One that music critics considered her ugly and openly said so. And two that she was on the Tonight show back in the late fifties/very early sixties singing "I Love You Porgy." Both those memories go hand in hand. Both those memories speak volumes about what a Black woman could and could not do in the Eisenhower era. They called her ugly because she was Black. Literally. Dark skinned. In the late fifties, somewhat like it is now, only a tad more adamant, couldn't no dark skinned woman be pretty. In commercial terms, the darker the uglier. Nina was dark. She sang "Porgy" darkly. Made you know that the love she sang about was the real sound of music, and that Julie Andrews didn't have a clue. Was something so deep, so strong that I as a teenager intuitively realized that Nina's sound was both way over my head and was also the water within which my soul was baptized. Which is probably why I liked it, and is certainly why my then just developing moth wings sent me shooting toward the brilliant flashes of diamond bright lightening which shot sparking cobalt blue and ferrous red out of the black well of her mouth. This was some elemental love. Some of the kind of stuff I would first read about in James Baldwin's Another Country, a book that America is still not ready to understand. Love like that is what Nina's sound is.

 

Her piano was always percussive. It hit you. Moved you. Socked it to you. She could hit one note and make you sit up straight. Do things to your anatomy. That was Nina. Made a lot of men wish their name was Porgy. That's the way she sang that song. I wanted to grow up and be Porgy. Really. Wanted to grow up and get loved like Nina was loving Porgy. For a long time, I never knew nobody else sang that song. Who else could possibly invest that song with such a serious message, serious meaning? Porgy was Nina's man. Nina's song. She loved him. And he was well loved.

 

In my youth, I didn't think she was ugly. Nor did I didn't think she was beautiful. She just looked like a dark Black woman. With a bunch of make-up on in the early days. Later, I realized what she really looked like was an African mask. Something to shock you into a realization that no matter how hard you tried, you would never ever master white beauty because that is not what you were. Fundamental Blackness. Severe lines. Severe, you hear me. I mean, you hear Nina. Dogonic, chiseled features. Bold eyes. Ancient eyes. Done seen and survived slavery eyes. A countenance so serious that only hand carved mahogany or ebony could convey the features.

 

The hip-notism of her. The powerful peer. Percussive piano. Pounding pelvis. The slow, unhurried sureness. An orgasm that starts in the toes and ends up zillions of long seconds later emanating as a wide-mouthed silent scream uttered in some sonic range between a sigh and a whimper. A coming so deep, you don't tremble, you quake. I feel Nina's song and think of snakes. Damballa undulations. Congolesian contractions. She is an ancient religion renewed. The starkness of resistance. And nothing Eurocentric civilization can totally contain. Dark scream. Be both the scream and the dark. A crusty fist shot straight up in the air, upraised head. Maroon. Runaway. No more auction block. The one who did not blink when their foot was cut off to keep them from running away. And they just left anyway. Could stand before the overseer and not be there. Could answer drunken requests to sing this or that love song and create a seance so strong you sobered up and afterwards reeled backward, pawing the air cause you needed a drink. You could not confuse Nina Simone with some moon/june, puritan love song. Nina was the sound that sent slave masters slipping out of four posted beds and roaming through slave quartered nights. Yes, Nina was. And was too the sound that sent them staggering back with faces and backs scratched, teeth marked cheeks, kneed groins, and other signs of resistance momentarily tattooed on their pale bodies. And despite her fighting spirit, or perhaps because of her fighting spirit, the strength and ultra high standard of femininity she established with her every breath, these men who would be her master would not sell her. Might whip her a little, but not maim her. Well, nothing beyond cutting the foot so she would stay. With Nina it could get ugly if you came at her wrong, and something in her song said any White man approaching with intentions of possessing me is wrong. Nina sounded like that. Which is why this anti-fascist German team wrote "Pirate Jenny" and it was a long, long time before I realized that the song wasn't even about Black people.

 

Nina Simone was/is something so potent, so fascinating. A fertile flame. A cobra stare. Once you heard her, you could not avoid her, avoid the implications of her sound, be ye Black, White or whatever. Her blackness embraced the humanity in all who heard her, who experienced being touched by her, whose eyes welled up with tears sometimes, feeling the panorama of sensations she routinely but not rotely evoked wherever, whenever she sat at the altar of her piano and proceeded to unfurl the spiritual history of her people. When Nina sang, sings, if you are alive, and hear her, really hear her, you become umbilicaled into the cosmic and primal soul of suffering and resurrection, despair and hope, slavery and freedom that all humans have, at one level or another, both individually and ethnically, experienced, even if only vicariously. After all, who knows better the range of reactions to the blade, than does the executioner who swings the axe?

 

Nina hit you in the head, in the heart, in the gut and in the groin. But she hit you with music, and thus her sonorous fusillades, even at their most furious, did you no harm. In fact, the resulting outpouring of passions was a healing. A lancing of sentimental sacs which held the poisons of oppressive tendencies, the biles of woe-filled self-pity. A draining from the body of those social toxicants which embitter one's soul. A removal of the excrescent warts of prejudice and chauvinism that blight one's civil make-up.

 

Sangoma Simone sang and her sound was salving and salubrious. Her concerts were healing circles. Her recordings medicinal potions. She gave so much. Partaking of her drained you of cloying mundanities. Poured loa-ed essentials into the life cup. You left her presence, filled to your capacity and aware of how much there was to achieve by being a communicative human being.

 

Nina Simone. Supper clubs could not hold her. Folk songs were not strong enough. Popular standards too inane. Even though she did them. Did them to death. Took plain soup, and when she finished adding her aural herbs, there you had gumbo. Nina hit her stride with the rebellious uprises of the sixties, and the fierce pride of the seventies. Became a Black queen, an African queen. Became beautiful. Remember, I am talking about a time when we really believed Black was beautiful. Not just ok, acceptable, nothing to be ashamed of, but beautiful. Proud. And out there. Not subdued. Not refined. Not well mannered. But out there. Way out. Like Four Women. Like Mississippi Goddamn. Like Young, Gifted And Black. Like Revolution. Like: "And I Mean Every Word Of It". This was Nina who did an album with only herself. Voice. Piano. And some songs that commented on the human condition in terms bolder than had ever been recorded in popular music before. Are we The Desperate Ones? Have We Lost The Human Touch?

 

My other memories of Nina have to do with the aftermath. I recall the aridness of counterrevolutionary America clamping down and shuttering the leading lights of the seventies. Nina's radiance was celestial, but oh my, how costly the burning. Seeking fuel she fled into exile. Who would be her well, where could she find a cool drink of water before she died?

 

Then, like indiscreet body odors, the rumors and gossip began floating back. The tempest. The turning in on the self. What happens when they catch you and bring you back. Reify and commodify you, relegate you back into slavery. You are forced to fight in little and sometimes strange ways. But the thrill is gone. Cause only freedom is thrilling, and ain't no thrill in being contained on anybody's plantation, chained to anybody's farm. Anybody's, be they man, woman or child. Nobody's. Nothing thrilling about not being liberated.

 

Nina, like most of us, went crazy so that she could stay sane. Just did it hard. Was a more purer crazy. Cause she had so much to be sane about. So much that leeches wanted to siphon, sip, suck.

 

How do you stay sane in America? You go crazy. In order to be.

 

To be proud. And beautiful. And woman. And dark. Black skinned. You have to go crazy to stay sane. You have to scream, just to make room for your whispers. You have to cry and cuss, so that you can kiss and love. You have to fight. Fight. Fight. Lord. Fight. I gets. Fight. So tired. Fight. Of. Fight. Fighting all the time. But ooohhh child things are gonna get easier.

 

Don't tell me about her deficiencies, or her screwed up business affairs, her temper tantrums, her lack of understanding, her bad luck with men, her walking off the stage on the audience. Don't tell me about nothing. None of that. Because all of that ain't Nina. Nina Simone is song. And all of that is just whatever she got to do. Like she said: Do What You Got To Do. Oh Lord, Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood.

 

I play Nina Simone. Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow. This morning. Tonight at noon. Under the hot sun of Amerikkka, merrily, merrily, merrily denigrating us. In those terrible midnights. I play Nina Simone. Just to stay sane. Stay Black. To remember that Black is beautiful, not pretty. Beautiful is more than pretty. Beautiful is deep. I play beautiful Nina Simone. Nina Song. I play Nina Simone. And whether Nina's song turns you off or Nina's song turns you on, whose problem, whose opportunity is that?

 

No. Let me correct the English. I don't play Nina Simone. I serious Nina Simone. Serious. Simone. Put on her recordings and Nzinga strut all night long. And even that is not long enough.

 

To be young, or ancient. Gifted, or ordinary. But definitely Black, definitely the terrible beauty of Blackness. Nina Simone. Nina Song. Nina. Nina. Nina.

 

Oh my god. I give thanx for Nina Simone.

 

—kalamu ya salaam