"Electric Arches" Response

Electric Arches is a collection of prose, poems, and images composed by Eve L. Ewing of Chicago, Illinois.  The book’s aesthetics as well as its meaning is characterized by afro-futurism – the idea that black people will be present in a more just and equitable future – a fact that must be paraded as science fiction (or something like it) because white supremacy’s visions of the future are entirely whitewashed.  The book is comprised of three parts, “true stories,” “oil and water,” and “letters from the flatlands.”  The first section contains some vivid accounts of happenings as observed by the author or some other omniscient narrator both real and unreal.  Several of these scenarios deal with incidents of blatant racism which inspires the quote at the beginning of the section by Assata Shakur reading, “Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions” (qtd. in Ewing 5).  The second section of Electric Arches seems as auto-biographical as a collection of vivid yet visionary poems can.  “[M]y hair was in a zoo. my hair escaped from the zoo and took out three officers of the law before they shot my hair up full of tranquilizers, tranquilizers only because my hair is too valuable to die” (Ewing 37).  These lines taken from the page entitled, “why you cannot touch my hair,” expresses a certain way Ewing constructs her reality within Electric Arches namely infusing parts of ourselves and our world with a kind of magical realism.  The final portion of the book, “letters from the flatlands,” are primarily poems and visual art dedicated to recounting childhood in Chicago as well as a few detours through unspecified rural USAmerican destinations to visit family.  The ending side-by-side poem titled, “Affirmation” and dedicated, “to youth living in prison after Assata Shaku,” commands the reader to, “Speak this to yourself/until you know it is true.”  What follows is a side-by-side poem that embodies the blessings of a living being, the miracle of hope for something, “green and wonderful” and ends with a mantra proclaiming, “I am alive/I am alive/I am alive” (Ewing 89). 

            The central issues in this book are race, growing up black and a woman in the United States, everyday images infused with hope and magic, and the importance of family and place.  These issues are unconventional, yes, but so is this text.  One short story entitled, “four boys on Ellis [a re-telling]” describes the narrator (gender unspecified) witnessing four boys on the curb being detained by the Chicago Police Department with “the university police…looking on.”  The narrator pulls up in their car and asks, “if their parents had been called and informed that they were being questioned.”  Only for the narrator, to be yelled at by the police to leave.  It’s at this point, when the narrator will not leave, that they close their eyes and concentrate, “very hard, picturing the boys at home, eating cereal and watching Naruto.”  When they open their eyes, the police are shouting trying to grab onto the shoelaces of the boys as they drift off into the air.  The bikes also drift up, “and they [manage] to climb atop them midair, which was impressive.”  They smile and sing as they fly away. 

Although the race of the four boys is not specified, it’s not a stretch to understand that they’re most likely black evidenced by the academic setting.  The only time I ever talked to Michigan State University police was one time in when I was in middle-school when a black friend and I were skateboarding around campus and were stopped and questioned by police regarding bike thefts.  Perhaps I am allowing this experience to direct my reading, but the flavor of this book does makes it all to clear that the four boys are black.  Returning to the short story, it does work in touching on almost all the central issues I listed above.  The complexity of race and growing up black in the US is present in the universal relatability of this story to the experiences of young black folks, the power of the “the boys at home, eating cereal and watching Naruto,” and the importance of family and place: place being in the title and family being invoked when the narrator is talking to the police about the boys’ situation.  This book does not offer easy answers not only because it’s dense and magical in its language, but because it portrays the issues in an interconnected realism – connecting racism, to womanhood, to a sense of place and finally a sense of hope and positivity.  This is a difficult accomplishment – invoking hope out of the nightmare of racism – but it is achieved in this text. 

The second to last poem in the book titled, “Requiem for Fifth Period and the Things That Went On Then,” could be used as required reading for a teachers conference in its ability to quickly and profoundly introduce us to several young people as well as the staff at an undisclosed school.  The first young person introduced is Javonte Stevens, a fourth grader, who is asking the gym teacher if it’s alright for another teacher to send over three students because they did not bring money for the field trip and will not be able to go to the aquarium.  Another young person is Nakyla Smith, who is crying in the bathroom and then in the counselor’s office to disclose cigarette burns on her body.  The clues are there that indicate the identities of these young people as well as the adults in the narrative.  They indicate pain, lack of resources, and the work of the adults populating these under-resourced schools to be strong and supportive for the youth and their needs.  The narrative weaves in and out of focus from adult to young person and so on, and in doing so captures the turmoil each faces in only two three pages of stanzas (Ewing 84-86).

One of the most descriptive short stories as far as characters goes is a story called, “The Device.”  A, “hive mind of Black nerds,” create a machine that eventually is revealed to get in touch with a person’s ancestors.  A “gangly…fifth grader from Providence,” was chosen to be the first user of the device at its much-anticipated public debut.  Her school’s science enrichment afterschool program got cut, her dress is making her legs itch, she’s read and practiced the script, and when contact is made she reads the question from the paper, “to get it exactly right.  ‘What words can you offer us to help us be free as black people in a world that does not love us?’”  The device hums and shakes and the audience waits in a fervor, but nothing comes.  The little girl begins, “’Grandmoth-‘ she began.  But sound from the device cut her off, echoing across the auditorium, bouncing against brick and plaster and ricocheting in everyone’s ears.  It was laughter…and the woman somewhere in America, sometime in America, laughed and laughed and laughed” (Ewing 9-14).  It’s a joyous story with attention to detail both culturally speaking in it’s description of the inter-disciplinary make-up of minds to build the device, but also the young girls posture on stage being the first one to speak across time and space to an ancestor.  The response is so natural which breaks from the seriousness of all those that put so much time into building a telepathic-time-communication device, and it works.  The use of a young black girl to be the first to use the machine is decided by those, “in charge of communication and media and symbolism,” a great way to label the philosophers and English intellects, but when the girl is about to turn it on the head scientist realizes (wrongly thankfully), “that having a child be the one to do it was symbolic, sure, and also very, very stupid…the girl would be the first to die, and he would live just long enough to see it happen (Ewing 9-12).  Ewing does great work weaving the thoughts and narratives of adults and young people in this book both in her prose and poetry.  This is as refreshing for myself as it is for young people reading this book.  Young people are not offered only perspectives of young people, but also the fallible and often blinded-by-hubris positions of adults.  Adults are offered a magical view of the everyday that is beaten out of us by the trenches of adult life. 

This entire collection is a testament to the creative resistance that is being black and a woman in the United States.  “Every black woman is an artist/versed in the craft of the swift,/the game of the subtle,/the gift of the sideways glance” (Ewing 30-31).  In a society that has doubly oppressed the person hood of black women there is a gesture of resistance that speaks volumes: a sideways glance!  This is but a light reading of what is happening in this book.  In another auto-biographical story, “Of all the hours I have spent in Shiloh Baptist Church, I cannot tell you the message or even the topic of a single sermon.  But I can tell you whose grandbaby I am” (Ewing 75).  This is the last line of, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Black Jesus,” a fantastic piece explaining the authors personal beliefs on the spiritual universe as well as the connections between black people in the US and the biblical stories of Moses, Abraham, and Eve.  “We’re a people forever in exodus….we are the masters of the art of sacrifice…[Eve] was the first person on this strange sunlit planet to know anything at all, though she paid for it with terrible cramps” (Ewing 72-73).  The author doesn’t shy away from the hard questions but invokes them in a literary way to represent the narratives of the oppressed. 

This book is marvelous.  It is rooted in a Midwestern urban identity but can transcend to an any audience that has looked to long at trash in an empty parking lot at night time.  The book documents in poetic and magical realism, the hardships and beauty of growing up all at once.  The format of the book is unconventional revealing to young people that the rules can be broken in the name of a creative spirit and as long as it brings positivity, justice and laughter to the world.  This book is relevant in the United States as it comes from a conscientious voice on the bottom of the social hierarchy of this white supremacist patriarchal capitalist Empire.  It’s a voice of beautiful resistance – a luxury that will only be afforded to those seeking another way of organizing this world and the ways we write about this world. 

(Written in the Summer of 2018 for a Young Adult Literature course.)

Fighting in "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian"

To steal from Malcolm X, the indigenous people of the Americas didn’t land on Plymouth rock; Plymouth rock landed on them.  The occupation and struggle at Standing Rock is just the most recent manifestation of the fight that indigenous people are involved in going all the way back to 1492.  Sherman Alexie himself explains that he writes “to give [young adults] weapons – in the form of words and ideas – that will help them fight their monsters” (Alexie,   Why the Best…).  It is within this angle – an angle of fighting the monster of white supremacy - that I re-read a chapter from Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

In the chapter appropriately titled, “How to Fight Monsters,” Junior describes, “The Unofficial and Unwritten Spokane Indian Rules of Fisticuffs.”  The rules essentially trap Spokane Indians into a cycle of violence as retribution against insults, the government agencies meant to manage American Indians and white people on the reservation (Alexie, The Absolutely… 61 – 62).  It’s soon after laying out these rules that “Roger the Giant” tells Junior an ultra-racist joke and in return, Junior punches him in the face.  Roger, a white male at the white school, calls Junior, “an animal,” and walks away from him.  Junior, being conditioned in the rules of violence for Indians and not white people, is confused at the response and even yells the question, “What are the rules?” as Roger and his friends depart (Alexie 64-66).  In this scene during lunchtime, Roger comes to represent the violent white supremacist elements of USAmerican culture.  Roger insults African and Native Americans and is shocked when the scrawny Indian kid responds with physical violence, but Roger doesn’t fight back.  He doesn’t have too: the white supremacist society is already doing it for him systemically.  The shock Roger experiences can be likened to the shock felt by USAmericans after 9/11 – the greatest purveyor of violence in the world (the USA) cannot comprehend being the target of mass violence.  The rules laid out for Spokane Indians (and most other oppressed peoples of the world) don’t give Junior that option when Roger spews racism: especially for indigenous people, fighting is the only option for resisting white supremacy whether that looks like European settler colonialism, the lingering effects of genocide, forced displacement and/or the poverty of reservation life. 

At the end of the chapter, “In Like a Lion,” which depicts the second meeting between Reardan and Wellpinit on the basketball court, Junior realizes that the white school of Reardan is the Goliath that just defeated the David of Wellpinit and admits that, “maybe my white teammates had problems, serious problems, but none of their problems were life threatening” (Alexie 195).  Whether it’s fist fights or the violence of structural poverty and the resulting privation, the indigenous people of the Americas will continue to be subjected to battles for survival until social, economic and racial justice is achieved. 

(Written Summer 2018 for a Young Adult Literature course.)

My Response to "The Real Charlotte" by Somerville and Ross (Published 1894)

          After a year of education articles and thousands of tweets, I pushed my mental stamina to the limit.  What I will tell my literary friends about Somerville and Ross’ The Real Charlotte is the amount of character and setting development that took place before things got moving.  I posited real interest into the characters and plot around chapter eighteen, or roughly two hundred pages into the story, when Francie is sent to the Dysart estate in Bruff.  I imagine in 1894, a capsizing yacht may appeal to readers, but what I took away from this text was how the authors described characters and their near-constant cringe-worthy behavior (Isn’t that the motif of literature?).  Francie Fitzpatrick is tactfully crafted as physically stunning but, “to whom flirtation was as ordinary and indispensable as the breath of her nostrils” (377).  The object of her desire remains a mystery for the reader until she loses the reader’s sympathy by turning down the good guy.  One hundred pages from the end, the authors lay bare Francie’s character, “she had never pretended … that she was in love with him [Mr. Lambert]; her engagement had been the inevitable result of poverty, and aimlessness, and bitterness of soul…” (408).  The mixture of economic position and carelessness portray Francie as a product of her environment, while at the same time, entirely to blame.  Miss Charlotte Mullen is subtly shown to be a bearable shrew until she kills her friend, Mrs. Lambert, in the surfacing of, “the real Charlotte” (304).  It took a several re-readings of the scene in chapter thirty-two where Mrs. Lambert dies while being exposed to the traumatic correspondence between her husband and Francie.  The real Charlotte allows Mrs. Lambert to die by cleaning her tracks rather than providing the lady with her “drops” (312).  It is a truly horrendous display of Miss Mullen’s ruthlessness in forcing the “turkey-hen” to come to terms with her husband’s infidelity (306).  Mr. Lambert is a creepy sad excuse for a human who failed to kill Francie in his yacht only to be the impromptu destination of Francie’s fatal ride after he wins over his Lolita.  The nature of his creepy predation is laid bare in chapter sixteen when he meets with Francie after the yachting accident.  He becomes indignant, whiney, predatory, and finally, generous when he spends part of his loan from Miss Mullen on a gold bracelet for Francie (160).  Christopher Dysart materialized as the hope of all my goodwill for the cast in this novel.  His demeanor is amicably aloof yet intellectually burdened; “deadlock[ed]”as the authors mention in his description on page 120.  Even after saving the “man-eater[‘s]” life (Francie, according to his mother, Lady Dysart) he is still rejected when he proposes to her (239, 325)).  The cast is a collection of debased money-grabbers, socialites, and their Irish plebian-speaking servants, but ultimately the book reveals a certain “social poverty” of the Irish gentry (correction: all elites, past and present), and those immediately below them in the socio-economic hierarchy (197).  The Real Charlotte is a remarkable novel that I’m sure only increases in value as the knowledge of late 19^th century Ireland increases. 

Why I Will Resist Richard Spencer (March 2, 2018)

On March 5, alt-right agitator Richard Spencer is coming to our campus to speak on his white nationalist politics. I will be one of a thousand people in the streets to make sure the event is cancelled. Let me explain.

I first encountered Spencer in 2017 when The Atlantic released video of a man in a three-piece suit shouting, “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail Victory.” The audience in the room cheered, stood up and some of them threw the straight-arm Nazi salute. I was terrified — why are there Americans advocating Nazi politics?

Later, news began spreading about the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, planned for August 12, 2017. The night prior, videos surfaced of white men carrying tiki torches on the campus of the University of Virginia chanting slogans inspired by Nazi propaganda. The day of, brawls broke out in the streets, a police helicopter crashed, and a white nationalist drove his car into a crowd killing one and injuring others. Richard Spencer was an integral organizer in the events that shocked a nation and took a young woman’s life. The next day, I attended a vigil on the steps of the Capitol in Lansing and was determined to do all I could to resist any Neo-Nazi presence in my community. 

Most recently, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a study claiming in the last four years “over 100 people [have been] killed or injured by alleged perpetrators influenced by the so-called ‘alt-right.’” The study cites Richard Spencer for coining the term “alt-right” in 2008, but let’s cut through the euphemisms and just call them what they are: white nationalist Neo-Nazis. This country has a past of white nationalist terrorism from the thousands of lynchings following the Civil War to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963 to Dylann Roof killing nine worshipers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015. 

The connection is clear: white nationalist ideologies are historically and inherently violent. The election of Trump drew these trolls out of the digital space, and now they are desperately trying to gain a foothold in mainstream politics. The protest at the MSU pavilion is not an attack on free speech but an expression of community self-defense against the spread of a political ideology seeped in hatred and violence. 

White supremacy does not go away by ignoring it. It never has and never will. White supremacy is defeated when communities come together to confront Neo-Nazis wherever they try to rally. The country will be watching. The Neo-Nazis will be watching. This is our chance to tell Richard Spencer and his white nationalist sympathizers that their hate is not welcome here.

Originally Published by The State News.

Meditation on Isaiah 26:5-6

It's Sunday, so Old Testament.

"He humbles those who dwell on high,
he lays the lofty city low;
he levels it to the ground
and casts it down to the dust.
Feet trample it down -
the feet of the oppressed,
the footsteps of the poor."
(Isaiah 26:5-6)

Always be on guard with those willing to quote scripture, but nonetheless, let me rap.

Why would the lofty city be trampled to dust by the footsteps of the poor and the oppressed? Because earthly (read: capitalistic, militaristic, or ultra-rich) power cannot sustain itself. In other words, the institutions and people within them wielding excessive wealth, arms, political power, and/or ego do not practice a spirituality and praxis that the Lord acknowledges as valid. Bluntly speaking, the Lord Jesus Christ did not come to comfort the ultra-rich or even the American middle class, but the global poor, and the fucked up thing about wealth and power, even in modest increments, is that it allows one the privilege to not have to encounter the oppressed or the poor. White people don't need to have friends of color which leaves them lacking in the basic understanding of their own white privilege. Rich people in capitalism, by definition, do not need to entertain the anxieties of privation. And white, middle-class citizens of the United States do not know the trials endured by those who are oppressed by United States Armed Forces, United States police forces, United States industrial-prison complexes, or simply society at large. All this privilege creates a certain sense of entitlement that allows white, middle-class (and monetarily above) United States citizens to experience a lofty sense of deservingness. But come on. Christianity, the spirituality offered to us by Jesus of Nazareth, is not about the Self, the Dollar, or even Stability - no, a life centered around Christ is inherently centered around the humbling of the powerful by the soiled and weary feet of the disregarded, dispossessed and disenfranchised.

A Thanksgiving Prayer (2016)

A Thanksgiving Prayer (2016)

Original by Williams S Burroughs. Revised by Bucko Rinsky

To Dwayne Marion Stafford for making racists afraid by any means necessary

Thanks for the wild salmon and the passenger pigeons

Destined to be shat out through wholesome American guts.

Thanks for all the pipelines

Pulsing poison and oil and potential jobs.

Thanks for Blackwater, TigerSwan and Wells Fargo

For securing the borders of peace and greed.

Thanks for the Right to Vote

To stimulate hope in the pesticidal stew of modernity.

Thanks for ignorance, pride, and violence by pale-faced asses.

For Fox News, Netflix, the NFL and head trauma.

Thanks for churches preaching morally-insured prosperity

In the Twittering depths of the promise-less land.

Thanks for All Lives Matter but some more than others.

Thanks for the War on Terror

For domestic peace and the industrial-prison complex.

Thanks for the FBI, CIA, NSA, local pigs, Snapchat,

And one nation under surveillance.

Yes, thanks for all the memories –

All right, let’s see your phones.

You always were psychotic and you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal

Of the last and greatest of human dreams.

 “Sell all your possessions and give to the poor.” (Luke 12 : 32-34)

Remember November 26 is Buy Nothing Day!

Reflections on "Requiem for the American Dream: Noam Chomsky and Principles of Concentration of Wealth and Power" (2015)

Truth is my girlfriend and I were searching Netflix for The Notebook (2004) and Noam Chomsky's name came up under the film title Requiem for the American Dream: Noam Chomsky and Principles of Concentration of Wealth and Power (2015). We didn't find The Notebook that night, but this morning I finished the latter film. I recommend it as it is informative and an informed populace is the cornerstone of a thriving democracy, which under the current conditions, is not what's happening with the American Democracy.

Some Summary, Some Reflection on The Principles of the Concentration of Wealth and Power:

1.REDUCE DEMOCRACY - The powerful and wealthy never liked Democracy because it gave the majority the ability to check the opulent minority. The powerful and wealthy live by a 'vile maxim,' namely, 'all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.'

2. SHAPE IDEOLOGY - This 'vile maxim' purporting selfish greed must become a national value especially in the face of the movements of the 1960s (Native American, Civil Rights, Women Rights, Anti-War, Student Movements etc.) so the solution becomes to reduce funding and standardized education, a move which we continue to see with the increase of charter schools under Obama.

3. REDESIGN THE ECONOMY - The financialisation of the American economy and the decline of manufacturing. Evil banks, remember the financial crisis of 2007-2008?   Chomsky: “And, of course, the capital is free to move. Workers aren’t free to move, labor can’t move, but capital can.” So manufacturing workers of the world are put into competition ('dey terk er jerbs') while the executives above will take risks and move money around in complicated ways so as to produce so-called profits.

4. SHIFT THE BURDEN - The 'precariat' meaning precarious proletariat meaning working class people living precarious lives because of low wages, increasing rent costs, medical bills, are a potential threat to the status quo. In order to curb the threat of popular movements, the corporations that control so much wealth and subsequently policy, paid and politiked their way out of paying a fair share of taxes while wage and consumption taxes continue. Capital can move, corporations can take their business to better tax havens, but Americans, well we're here to stay for better but increasingly worse.

5. ATTACK SOLIDARITY - De-fund social programs. Media divisiveness and non-coverage of social movements. Make education expensive. Trap young people in debt thus creating general anxiety and reducing social and political engagement.

6. RUN THE REGULATORS - From the business/political perspective, it makes sense for economists and financial experts/lobbyists to regulate the business and financial sector because of the specialized knowledge, but again the financial crisis of 2007 - 2008. The insidious result is a revolving door and a cultivation of power and irresponsibility among these crowds.

7. ENGINEER THE ELECTIONS - The DNC's non-support of Bernie Sanders. The fact that our options are a capitalist idiot , a politiking war-hawk, a bad cartoon of a libertarian, and a strange doctor who doesn't seem credible. All of this along with the supreme court ruling equating money as free speach thus opening the door for corporations (read in legalese: immortal persons) to pave the way for whomever they seem fit. Finally, are we even talking about policies in 2016 or just scandal after scandal...

8.  KEEP THE RABBLE IN LINE – Militarize police and spy on your Yahoo email account and your twitter feed and everything else.  Imagine if healthcare workers, I’m talking about the ‘specialists’ keeping your grandma alive in the nursing home unionized?   Imagine if the service industry in American had a union.  Imagine if labor organized because we’re all already laboring away for hourly wages, so why not organize, be represented by ourselves, and present solutions to management that they had to take seriously.  But be careful because organized labor is a serious threat to the infamous 1% and the technocrats that protect them.

9. MANUFACTURE CONSENT - The new iPhone doesn't have a headphone jack but you do have the old one which is old and lame. Do you know what that commercial is actually selling or was it just funny? Chomsky says the market economy should be characterized by informed consumers making rational decisions, but what advertising is doing is selling landscapes and celebrities and iconic presidents hoping to become just that and frankly nothing much at all.  A marketing major at my bar had a few drinks and said s/he’s in marketing to understand and manipulate how people think. 

10.  MARGINALIZE THE POPULATION – Chomsky offers April 15^th, Tax Day.  If this was a participatory democracy, where Americans actually influenced policy, then the sending of payment to further aid in the political sphere should be a day of celebration, a celebration of how awesome, inclusive and positive the United States Government actually is.  But this is not the case, paying taxes to some alien institution figure-headed by either Donald Trump or Hilary Clinton is the nightmare of tomorrow. 

Conclusion:

Information. Organization. Solidarity. Love. Positivity. Sympathy.  Community.  All for holding those with power and wealth accountable to society.  Ultimately, this society is based on the acquisition of wealth, of money both on the large scale and the personal scale, but what would a society look like with the human person as the primary focus.  The human person sleeping on the sidewalk.  The human person dispossessed of a rewarding job, of a healthy meal, of dignity. 

And why not throw some Jesus into the mix?  Jesus is just alright with me.

3“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
    for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
⁴ Blessed are those who mourn,
    for they will be comforted.
⁵ Blessed are the meek,
    for they will inherit the earth.
⁶ Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
    for they will be filled.
⁷ Blessed are the merciful,
    for they will be shown mercy.
⁸ Blessed are the pure in heart,
    for they will see God.
⁹ Blessed are the peacemakers,
    for they will be called children of God.
¹⁰ Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
    for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

¹¹ “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. ¹² Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.