Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Review: Junious Ricardo Stanton on In the Crazy House Called America, essays by Marvin X
By
Junious Ricardo Stanton
Marvin X Offers A Healing Peek Into His Psyche
Review of In the Crazy House Called America
By Junious Ricardo Stanton
Rarely
is a brother secure and honest enough with himself to reveal his
innermost thoughts, emotions or his most hellacious life experiences.
For most men it would be a monumental feat just to share/bare his soul
with his closest friends but to do so to perfect strangers would be
unthinkable, unless he had gone through the fires of life and emerged
free of the dross that tarnishes his soul. Marvin X, poet, playwright,
author and essayist does just that in a self-published book entitled In the Crazy House Called America.
This
latest piece from Marvin X offers a peek into his soul and his psyche.
He lets the reader know he is hip to the rabid oppression the West heaps
upon people of color especially North American Africans while at the
same time revealing the knowledge gleaned from his days as a student
radical, black nationalist revolutionary forger of the Black Arts
Movement, husband, father lover, a dogger of women did not spare him the
degradation and agony of descending into the abyss of crack addiction,
abusive and toxic relationships and family tragedy.
Perhaps
because of the knowledge gained as a member of the Nation of Islam, and
his experiences as one of the prime movers of the cultural revolution
of the '60, the insights he shares In the Crazy House Called America are
all the keener. Marvin writes candidly of his pain, bewilderment and
depression of losing his son to suicide. He shares in a very powerful
way, his own out of body helplessness as he wallowed in the dregs of an
addiction that threatened to destroy his soul and the mess his
addictions made of his life and relationships with those he loved.
But
he is not preachy and this is not an autobiography. He has already been
there and done that. In sharing his story and the wisdom he has gleaned
from his life experiences and looking at the world through the eyes of
an artist/healer, Marvin X serves as a modern day shaman/juju man who in
order to heal himself and his people ventures into the spirit realm to
confront the soul devouring demons and mind pulverizing dragons; he is
temporarily possessed by them, heroically struggles to rebuke their
power before they destroy him; which enables him to return to this
realm, tell us what it is like, prove redemption is possible, thereby
empowering himself/ us and helping to heal us. He touches on a myriad of
topics as he raps and writes about himself and current events.
Reading
this book you know he knows what it is like to come face to face with
and do battle with the insanity and death this society has in store for
all Africans. Marvin X talks about his sexual relations/dysfunction,
drugs, media and free speech, sports, black political power or the lack
thereof, the war on drugs and the current War on Terrorism, nothing is
off limits. He includes reviews of music, theater as well as film, but
not as some smarter/ holier than thou, elitist observer.
Marvin
X writes as one actively engaged in life, including its pain and
suffering. He lets us know he was a willing and active participant in
his addiction, how it impacted his decision making, his role as a
parent, his male-female "relationships", his ability to be creative
within a movement to liberate African people and the world from the
corruption of Caucasian hegemony.
Marvin
X is in recovery and it has not been easy for him. As a writer/healer
he still has the voice of a revolutionary poet/playwright, it is a voice
we need to listen and pay attention to. He has survived his own
purgatory and emerged stronger and more committed to life and saving his
people. As North American Africans (his term to differentiate us from
our continental and diasporic brethren) he sees the toll the insanity of
this culture takes on us. His culturally induced self-destructive
lifestyle choices and the death of his son is a testament to how life
threatening and lethal this society can be.
But
Marvin X also talks about spiritual redemption, the ability to
transcend even the most horrific experiences with resiliency and
determination so that one gets a glimpse of one's own divine
potential. This book is an easy read which makes it all the more
profound. In The Crazy House Called America is for brothers
especially. It is a book all black men should grab hold of and digest,
if for no other reason than to experience just how redemptively healing
and liberating being honest can be.
* * * * *
Marvin X is available for speaking and performing coast to coast. Check Youtube on his participation at the University of Chicago Sun Ra Conference, May 21-22, 2015. Also, check out his appearance at the University of California, Merced, where they performed a dramatic reading of his play Flowers for the Trashman that appears in the Black Arts Movement anthology edited by Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka and SOS: the Black Arts Movement Reader, edited by Sonia Sanchez, John Bracey and James Smerthurst, UMASS Press
jmarvinx@yahoo.com
www.blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com
510-200-4164
No comments:
Post a Comment