news from kintespace.com: Saturday, April 29 2006

Our second presentation of the poetry of David Mandessi Diop, following “ Les Vautours,” is a collaboration with Ousmane Sembène, the great talent who is often called “the father of African film.” The poetry of Diop is blended with the imagery of Sembène. This ‘collaboration’ is directed by me—and, in this rasx() context, the goal is to make this “mash-up” as natural as two brothers routinely doing the day’s chores. Both of these men trace their family to Senegal. Both of these men lived through was has been called “the tutelary era,” the residential colonialism of European powers in Africa—the modern renovation of the god complex.

Diop addresses these ‘tutelary deities’ directly in “To the Bamboozlers.” A single still image taken from Ousmane Sembène’s *La Noire de… *(Black Girl) looks to be the ideal companion for Diop’s sentiment. I hope the American, entertainment lawyers agree with me. Two more attempts are made with “Time of Martyrdom” and “The Hours,” using a handful more frames from La Noire de….

What is interesting is that Ousmane Sembène is a professional writer as well. I am curious about his opinion of the poetry of David Mandessi Diop. Should these two ‘brothers’ work together? Look and read for yourself.

::: Amiri Baraka: Somebody Blew Up America

::: ::: http://kintespace.com/p_baraka2.html

On June 17, 2004, Amiri Baraka was interviewed on KBFR, Boulder Free Radio, in Colorado. The end of this interview is punctuated by the poem “Somebody Blew Up America.” This is the poem that caused a law to be passed in New Jersey to indefinitely remove the position of Poet Laureate. In one of Baraka’s dispatches (7–1–03) he writes, “This attack on the US Constitution has been led by the Israeli Lobbyist Anti Defamation League who cite three lines of a 244 line poem as proof of the poet’s ‘Anti-Semitism’ (Who told 400 Israeli workers at the twin towers to stay home that day / Who told Sharon to stay away)… The ADL in characteristic dishonesty claims the mention of Israeli nationals is an attack on Jews, as if they did not understand the difference between the religion, Judaism and the reactionary nationalism of Israeli political Zionism.”

It is important that the interview precedes the poem so that a remnant of us, those not cut from same white toga that swaddled Ward Connerly, can decide, with our personal, decision-making capacity, why this poem was written—based on the testimony of Amiri Baraka himself. We need to struggle against our extremism: just because Baraka’s poem appears here does not imply that any of us here in the kinté space espouses communist culture, helps develop another Congressional Black Caucus by accident and have a daughter that grows up to preside over the slow death of a grass roots community-centered radio show. We here in the kinté space are convinced that Amiri Baraka is a poet and an elder teacher.

::: LIBRadio Sampler: Doctoral Warriors for the African Mind

::: ::: http://kintespace.com/p_libradio02.html

Education depends on ancestral information. In the traditional, non-colonial African context, this dependency is made explicit in various forms of ancestor ‘worship’—valuing the fact that our foremothers and fathers prepared a place for us—and the by product of this family way is a contribution to the entire world.

One fundamental problem with the education of African children worldwide is the quality of ancestral information. African children are being starved of the mental food supply that their ancestors provide. This nourishment is deliberately replaced with synthetic substances with many unhealthy side effects.

In this LIBRadio.com sampler, Dr. Leonard Jeffries in “The Albany Speech” reports on just how deliberate and explicit the starvation process is. His “ Review of the New York State Curricular Materials K–12” is one of few Internet artifacts left behind from epic battles with the likes of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Edward Irving Koch. The opinion here is that Dr. Jeffries was a bright spark in Reagan’s 1980s, helping to ignite a white-supremacist cultural revival such that, to this day, the word “multiculturalism” is always received with cynical smirks by the properly assimilated. The opinion here is that Schlesinger’s corporate-backed propaganda pamphlet, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, is called a “classic” to signal support for the supremacy of white power—and, at base, to mark Dr. Leonard Jeffries as an untouchable, a raving anti-Semite.

Our sample of Dr. Jeffries finds him revealing that the monumental Statue of Liberty, the idea of Édouard René Lefèvre de Laboulaye, was originally meant to represent the emancipation of Africans after the Civil War—it was not originally intended to celebrate a bicentennial or America’s love for immigrants. Laboulaye, a staunch abolitionist is mentioned briefly in Ken Burns’ The Statue of Liberty.

In this LIBRadio.com sampler, psychologist Dr. Amos Wilson in “White Imperialism and Black Self-Annihilation” details what happens mentally to African youth who are properly assimilated by dominator culture, incarnating the study of war. Our sampler presents the portion of his speech where the threat of “meta racism,” a term evidently coined by Étienne Balibar, is a possible wave of the future, drowning out the open and explicit displays of classic white supremacy.

Dr. Wilson reminds us that those who benefit from white supremacy by premeditated executive action are not boiling over with irrational hatred and crimes of passion. On the contrary, we must see cool calculus and the science of destruction, the study of war. By turning the findings of Robert Atkinson on their head, Dr. Wilson asserts that African youth are at risk for being driven insane, faced toward self-destruction. In “Adolescence” Atkinson writes, “The dangers for the adolescent are role confusion (i.e., a failure to arrive at a consistent, coherent, and integrated identity) and identity diffusion (i.e., an inability to commit oneself, even in late adolescence, to an occupation or ideological position and assume a responsible stance in life)…Teenagers become more interested in understanding themselves and why they behave the way they do or what influences shaped their personality. They become concerned with matters of confidence, the ability to perform well, a sense of worth, a sense of personal control, low levels of anxiety, and feeling good about one’s self. These, in fact, are the components of a good self-concept and are also important contributors to psychological well-being.”

Ancestral information, starting with accurate information from immediate family about family members, helps prevent “identity diffusion.” The full-length audio for these presentations are available at LIBRadio.com.

rasx()