news from kintespace.com ::: Friday, January 19, 2007

Reading Herschell Johnson’s biography on page 244 of We Speak as Liberators: Young Black Poets—An Anthology my junior instinct immediately says, ‘He wrote this bio’ himself.’ Here we have a 22 year old of 1970 writing a series of terse declarations like “Black poetry is a life force. It is putting the pressure where it should be.” The sentences go with a cadence that H. Rap Brown can pick up and run with…

Today’s Herschell Johnson selection is “We Are Not Mantan.” Try typing this title into Google™ and see what you get out of several billion Web pages. Today’s test returns no records. We are fascinated about how much has changed since 1970 and this third poem of our Orde Coombs series, following “Pearl Cleage: Feelings of a Very Light Negro as the Confrontation Approaches” and “Shirley Staples: Getting It Together,” is no exception.

So, based on our Google™ search, it is clear that the memory of Mantan Moreland is stored on more hard disks connected to the Internet than the memory of Herschell Johnson of Birmingham, Alabama (born, 1948). What’s more, when I see the facial expressions of the cartoon Zebra, Marty, in the 2005 animated feature, Madagascar (voice characterized by Chris Rock), I see a little bit of Mantan. When you want to get strong, young and direct like Herschell Johnson back in 1970 you can name names like, say, Bernie Mac. Bernie has a big-ass wallet that can bust you in the head down to the white meat and I’m sure Mantan Moreland can retreat to some fond stories of serious cash flow but somehow we are here writing about Herschell Johnson of Birmingham, Alabama (born, 1948) and almost forty years later we repeat his words, “We Are Not Mantan.”

::: Ashanti Alston: Black Anarchism

::: ::: http://kintespace.com/p_ashantialston0.html

In October of 2003 SLAM hosted a talk on “Black Anarchism” by former Black Panther and political prisoner, Ashanti Alston. We here in the kinté space have very little to add to the name of Ashanti Alston. His Internet coverage is impressive and substantial.

What’s interesting and not discussed at length is the relationship Black Anarchism has with traditional, ‘classical’ Africa. The opinion here is that, for example, as reported by Dr. Ernest N. Emenyonu, modern Nigeria has over 390 languages—languages inherited from traditional Africa. Does not this one indicator (of many) translate into a broken English concept resembling “Black Anarchism”? How can you have a centralized authority over 390 different streams of consciousness? Would you not need guns and disease, the fear of death, to control so many different kinds of people?

However, SLAM is described as a “multi-racial student and youth organization” so the keywords “multi-racial” and “youth” suggest that traditional Africa studies is not a high priority because it is not clearly and presently relevant to immediate gratification and is unfamiliar to pop culture. Even Runoko Rashidi says that what happened in ancient Egypt 5000 years ago has little to do with ‘what we need now.’ So Ashanti Alston has more challenges and struggles than those mentioned in his very engaging talk and he is not alone.

What stands out about the structure of this presentation is that the Questions and Answers portion is longer than the lecture. This shows anarchism in practice—and it seems to work for the level of intimacy required for such a situation.

::: Bryan D. Wilhite: Invisible Man

::: ::: http://kintespace.com/p_nvisible.html

This is the audio companion to the chapbook the adolescence of the cool. The point is to build a multi-media extravaganza of astonishing proportions never seen on radio or television. This project started well over three years ago. I had to buy a lot of equipment. I had to learn a few things and thangs. This is a personal challenge. Very personal.

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