Marvin X has been known by many names throughout his writing
and social activist career of five decades. Coming across the border from
Mexico while underground and sought by the FBI for refusing to serve in
Vietnam, he was Elijah Muhammad, using the birth certificate of Elijah
Muhammad’s grandson of the same name, who he had met while exiled in Mexico
City. His first Arabic teacher, Ali Sharif Bey, named him Nazzam which means
organizer or systematizer . Ali said a poet creates a system of mythology with
his work.
After observing Marvin X on the street, Ishmael Reed said,
“If you want to learn about motivation
and inspiration, don’t spend all that money going to workshops and seminars,
just go stand at 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland and watch
Marvin X at work. He’s Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland.”
One of his students, Ptah Allah El, says “The works of Plato
Negro prove to be a major contribution to the field of African philosophy. These
works provide a model for a standard approach toward reflective thinking and
critical analysis for African people, still trying to define their own
philosophical worldview…..”
As per Rumi, Bob Holman of the Bowery Poetry Club, NYC,
commented, “Marvin X is the USA’s Rumi…. X’s poems vibrate, whip, love in the
most meta—and physical ways imaginable and un-. He’s got the humor of Pietri,
the politics of Baraka, and the spiritual Muslim grounding that is totally new
in English—the ecstasy of Hafiz, the wisdom of Saadi. It’s not unusual for him to have a sequence
of shortish lines followed by a culminating line that stretches a quarter
page—it is the dance of the dervishes, the rhythms of a Qasida.
“He is a Master Teacher in many fields of thought—religion
and psychology, sociology and anthropology, history and politics, literature
and the humanities. He is a needed counselor, for he knows himself on the
deepest of personal levels and he reveals that self to us, that w might be his
beneficiaries…. One of America’s great story tellers. I’d put him ahead of Mark
Twain.”—Rudolph Lewis
He’s the new Malcolm X! Nobody’s going to talk about his
book (s) out loud, but they’ll hush hush about them. He’s very straight and
plain….—Jerri Lange, author Jerri, A Black Woman’s Life in the Media
Declaring Muslim American literature as a field of study is
valuable because by re-contextualizing it will add another layer of attention
to Marvin X’s incredibly rich body of work. Muslim American literature begins
with Marvin X. –Dr. Mohja Kahf
In terms of modernist and innovative, he’s centuries ahead
of anybody I know.—Dennis Leroy Moore, Brecht Forum, New York
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