Parable of the perfect man and the savages

In his full blown delusional mind, he was the crown jewel of God's love and mercy to the world. Except for him, the world could not and would not exist without his presence going to and fro spreading agape love to all. His version of Civilization was the best of all, no culture could be better for all mankind. In his mind, he liberated savages from ignorance, poverty and disease. He freed them from nakedness, tattoos, bones in noses, ears, and primitive belief in many gods except the three in one god of his choice. Even though they had lived in heaven on earth from the beginning of time, he convinced them they had to die to enter heaven. Sometimes he beat them to death or worked them to death so they could properly enter his heaven. He told them to stop using their herbal medicine and take his little pills he diluted from their herbs of flowers, bark, roots, weeds, gums, leafs. 

Everything he told them was a lie but he convinced them it was the truth so help him God. He told them the police was their friend no matter the police murdered them on a regular basis under the color of law.
He sold them dope to get them high but they overdosed and he did nothing to the big time dope dealers called drug stores. He put the little baby street dealers in prison for long periods of time.

He said the drug store dope dealers were too big to jail! He said the bankers who laundered dope money were too big to jail.

So the perfect man and his perfect world enjoyed his days of power and glory until The Big Payback!

He wasn't happy about the big payback! He didn't smile. He didn't want to make love to his woman anymore. He wanted to kill himself.

The people told him he couldn't kill himself. They rounded him up and took him to a camp for long term recovery and reeducation. Those who couldn't recover from their disease called hubris and narcissism, were simply denied food until their demise. The others were eventually released but required to wear the ankle monitor for life. They were required to drink an herb tea that prevented them from telling lies and spreading fake news. The police were disarmed, drug stores closed and the bankers banked long term. The people returned to their Aboriginal myths and rituals and enjoyed the natural order of the world.

--MARVIN X

12/31/19

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

Parable of the wind and flowers

The wind talked with the flowers. The flowers told the wind they were overjoyed the ocean drowned all those ugly hateful ungrateful humans. Yes the wind said, I blew their asses off the face of the Earth. They refused to live in harmony and peace with us. Weren't you tired of them, said the wind to the flowers? Yes, I was tired of them using me to correct their mistakes. They liked to beat their wives then buy her roses. Then beat her again and buy her more roses.

If they stopped beating her ass, they wouldn't need to cut us up, wrap us up and take us to the their wives.

I'm so happy the humans are no more. Maybe the sea will recycle them into happy fish. But I doubt the fish want any part of ugly humans who thought they were smarter than the Creator of the Universe. The wind said now we can live in peace and harmony forever. The trees can breathe again. The sun can dance and shine. The moon can glow in the dark. The birds, bees, ants can sing their hearts out. The snow can melt and fill rivers and streams. Thank God those wicked humans and their ungrateful bastard children are no more and shall never be again!

Marvin X

12/30/19

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

On the death of two sons Marvin X

On the death of two sons

Darrell and Marvin K, two sons of Marvin X in Southern Mexico, Pinotepta, Oaxaca. Marvin X had received a National Endowment for the Arts writing fellowship to research North American and Central American Africans in the Americas. He studied Africans in Mexico, from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic, from Alcapulco to Vera Cruz, Chetumal and into Central America, Belize. 

When my second son walked into a train due to medication for his mani-depression or bipolar state of mind, I immediately sank into a black hole beyond any space phenomena. My descent into the black hole was executed by my first son, my namesake, Marvin K, who called to tell me in the coldest voice I ever heard and shall never forget, "Darrel is no more. No more. He's gone!" In the deep structure of his voice, I heard jealousy and envy that his brother was no more, the brother he knew we enjoyed a relationship that I could/would never enjoy with him. He knew what my sister Debbie had told me once in chiding me for being absent in their lives, "You just don't know how much your youngest son is like you! He looks like you, walks like you, talks like you, studies like you, laughs like you...." I suspected my first son was indeed jealous and envious of my close relationship with his brother. But I never enjoyed the intimacy his brother and I enjoyed when we did connect. As my sister said, Darrel was like my twin, even I had to admit it. Sometimes it frightened me that we were so much alike, especially intellectually. Darrell was the intellectual, Marvin was the physical man, alas, he tried out for the SF 49rs on defense. And I attended enough of his college games at Northern Arizona and Fresno State to see him snatch the quarterback. Only problem was that off the field, I sensed he wanted to snatch me for fatherly abandonment and neglect. He told me I should not have been fighting to teach black studies at Fresno State College/University, 1969, I should have been taking care of his mother and two sons. No matter that black police sergeant Jack Kelly (RIP) told me years later, "Marvin, when you came to teach at Fresno State, you made things better for everybody, not just students at FSU. Before you came to teach, black police couldn't patrol the white side of town." Is there any possibility that I made it possible for my son to end his collegiate athletic career at FSU with a degree in computer programming? Is it possible I made it possible for my daughter Nefertiti to graduate from FSU with a B.A. in English? Sargent Jack Kelly said I made things better for everybody!

According to my son, I suppose I should not have opposed the war in Vietnam but somehow found a job to take care of my family or joined the US military to be cannon fodder for white supremacy wars in Asia. Well, no matter how well meaning my number one son's concerns, I fled into exile as a draft resister twice and when captured in British Honduras, Central America, now Belizes, I was deported back to the USA and spent five months in Terminal Island Federal Prison. Would my son have been more proud of me if I had gone to Vietnam and sent my G.I. check home to his mother? Well, I heard the incoming president of my alma mater, San Francisco State University, an Asian, when asked what his children thought about his new position, reply, simply, "We don't ask the children!"

As many children of 60s radicals and revolutionaries have said, "You were selfish to abandon and thus abuse and neglect your family for the revolution." And perhaps some of us were able to achieve a balance between family life and revolution but many of us were not in a mental state that permitted such equilibrium. It is an act of insanity to challenge the State, with its awesome military power, police, national guard, army, navy, air force, FBI, CIA, snitches and agents provocateurs. Simultaneously, Franz Fanon taught us the only way for the oppressed man and woman to regain their sanity is through the act of revolution. So, yes, we were crazy niggas who neglected self, family, money, all else for the cause of national liberation.

Therefore, how can our children call us selfish for our acts of total unselfishness? Askia Toure', Black Arts Movement co-founder, said his son called us the Broke Heroes because we were not economic opportunists, although many of us were and you can Google those who financially benefited from the Black Arts Movement and obtained commercial success. But for most of us, it was not about self, family and commercial success. As BAM philosopher Larry Neal said, BAM was the sister of the Black Power Movement that evolved from the Civil Rights (Rites, Sun Ra). Did Martin Luther King, Jr. die rich, did Malcolm X, did Kwame Toure', aka, Stokely Carmichael? Somebody said Kwame Toure' sold out when they saw him in a new pair of shoes.

So I conclude: when my baby boy walked into that train at 39 years old (Dr. Nathan Hare noted he was the same age as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dr. Hare noted that suicide and homicide are two sides of the same coin of death by oppression), and my number one son informed me my baby boy was no more, the tone of my oldest son's voice and our relationship since then has indicated to me that on the most painful day of my life, I not only lost one son but two! I do not know how to heal from such lost except that it has forced me to discard my patriarchal persona and accept the reality that my three daughters are three of the most powerful women who walk the planet earth! 

But no, no no! This is not the end of this narrative. I love my first son, my namesake.
No matter how much he has absorbed Mother love, I love him still. After all, I recognize he is an arrogant bastard like his dad. He doesn't know I know his foibles including while he was known as Deacon Jack (at his church in Sac. He didn't know I had spies in his church that told me of his every move, good and bad. When he did bad, my spies told me Deacon Jack wasn't right. The preachers, twin brothers of the church, told me it wasn't their church, it belonged to Deacon Jack. They said he laid every brick and stone. It was Deacon Jack's church.  He built the Family Center. Deacon Jack was the man.

So please know I love my first son. No matter I lost him along with my baby boy. I cannot explain the pain of lost of two sons simultaneously. It is a pain beyond words. I'm doing my best to transcend the pain of my second son so I can accept the pain of son #1. Gibran told us our children come through us but they are not us. We are the bow, they are the arrow. I love my first son, second son and three daughters. I thank their mothers for blessing me with the most wonderful children any father could desire. Mothers, please forgive me for my abuse, neglect and shortcomings. I eternally praise you as the mothers of my children who have come into the world to be a joy and pleasure for all humankind.
--Marvin X
12/28/19

--Marvin X

12/28/19

SHADE GREATEST HITS 2017 The best of SHADE / FULL ALBUM /

Sade's line I love the most is, "Every day is Xmas, every night is New Year's Eve!" I live by these lines.
With me, every day is a holy day. I don't want to experience one unholy day! I'm scared, yeah!"

Parable of old sick and crazy by Marvin X

He was old sick and crazy, approaching eighty, suffering a multiple diseases from a toxic life in America, the toll was mental and physical. The physical included heart disease that may have derived from a broken heart, the disappointment of life, of wife, ungrateful bastard children, betrayal by friends, lost and turned out in the dope world. Old sick crazy. The mental and physical were indivisible, a bitter bag of toxicity. Toxic white supremacy took its toll on him. He fought back with Elijah Muhammad's Supreme Wisdom. Elijah taught him he was a god not a nigga. A nigga was a tool and fool of the white man, the devil.

He studied hard Supreme Wisdom. Wanted to share the knowledge but no one wanted hear him, dismissed him as a crazy old man tripping about seeing the Mother Ship every night in the sky. He was convinced the Mother Ship would one day descend and pick him up for the ride home, back to Paradise from which he had been kidnapped centuries ago. Some time he doubted the slave ships, the whip lynching rape. He said most of us were already here in the Americas, been here thousands of years. Here long before Columbus. We and the Native Americans were one, the same people. After a time some of his friends believed him, though his wife was a doubter like Job's wife and Lot's wife. She felt he was old sick and crazy. She fled to the church and prayed to Jesus her man would stop believing all that foolishness. She was embarrassed when her friends came over and he dropped his so called Supreme Wisdom on them. She wished he would come to Jesus but she knew he never would on the pain of death. So the old man wandered around the house in his madness and diseases although he fought the diseases with all the knowledge he could gather. He stopped eating food, said it was poison, full of toxicity, fertilizer, pesticides, insecticides. He lost a lot of weight, gave his old clothes to a friend.

He drank juices instead of food.

Very little meat bread rice potatoes.

His health improved and his wife changed her diet and lost weight. She told her friends how good she felt. She started trying to tell them some of the supreme wisdom she learned from him. He heard her whispering to her friends the shit he taught her that she appeared to reject. He knew she was hard headed, stiff necked and rebellous.

Easy to lead in the wrong direction hard to lead in the right direction. 

He loved his wife and hated her.

She loved her husband and hated him. This is nigga love. Ain't no love like nigga love. In a fit of rage, he told her when he died and she viewed him in his coffin he was going to spit in her face!

--MARVIN X

12/25/19

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

Dr. Ayodele Nzinga: Grand Diva of Drama in the Bay

Ayo has come a long way and is now the undisputed Grand Diva of Drama in the Bay. I pushed her into community development as the founder of the Black Arts Movement Business District CDC. As my star student, she didn't listen, she just watched me and learned, then implemented what she observed. Aside from Victor Willis who was my star actor and singer in my myth/ritual dance drama Resurrection of the Dead, and went on to become the leader of the Village People, Dr Ayodele Nzinga is on a roll that I predict will transcend drama into the political theatre of life, especially if she continues her association with fellow dramatist, activist Cat Brooks.

American Education: A failed State

We can begin with security as a national failure. The USA just passed a $700 billion defense budget but just as it cannot secure its borders, it cannot secure its children at school. We question the state of mind of politicians Left and Right, even more so, we question the voters who put them in office.

Why is not border security the top priority in the defense budget. Why is not security the priority of our schools? How can students study while one of their fellow students is advocating mass murder on the social media. Then too, the schools have become drug dens of students and teachers, booth need medication from the stress of the daily round. What curriculum is relevant to such traumatic times.

The atmosphere is full of toxicity, fake news, junk food; textbooks full of false narrative white supremacy history. Conservative school boards fight to maintain the status quo, discarding any Ethnic Studies that debunks the white supremacist world of make believe. Thanksgiving was a joyous affair. The Aboriginals discovered Columbus. What is the Fourth of July to kidnapped Africans?  New Year's, the most dreaded day in the life of kidnapped Africans, the annual slave auction, when mothers and fathers were sold down the river or their children, never to be seen again. 

To have a curriculum that is a full blown denial of history and reality, might easily lead to a mental paralysis or psychosis, upending the mental equilibrium of students, teachers and parents with the resultant drug abuse and violence, not to mention boredom.
--MARVIN X
12/18/19

Homeless: Cruel and Unjust Punishment

To be homeless is cruel and unjust punishment for the economic and/or mental condition of the poor, working poor and especially the displaced. Imagine, gentrification has caused displacement throughout the USA.

The subprime loan scam exacerbated the situation by displacing those ripped off by global and Wall Street investors.

In East Oakland, 40% of the single family homes are owned by Wall Street. The East Oakland Black community has been replaced by whites, Latinos and others. In West Oakland the black community has been replaced by whites who cannot afford to live in San Francisco. Pseudo liberal whites displace the blacks then put Black Lives Matter signs in their windows.

Everywhere you look in Oakland there are homeless encampments, mostly occupied by blacks.

As per solution, we say the homeless should occupy any new housing development and claim eminent domain in the name of Jesus and racial equity. 

There must be a Union of the homeless organized to advocate for the human right to be housed with persons given the life estate, thus ending homelessness overnight.

Tiny houses can be made permanent rather than transitional. 

Under the life estate, the houses cannot be sold, leased or transferred. Even shipping containers can be modified for the displaced and put on space under the land trust and life estate.

Mental Health issues, drug abuse, partner violence should be addressed with peer group sessions utilizing the harm reduction model. 

With a restructuring or destruction of the capitalist economic model, the displaced will gradually advance from wretchedness and despair, but not without a redistribution of the wealth acquired from capital accumulated in slavery and wage slavery in America and globally. By what right do the 1% own wealth equal to the 99%? Share the wealth rather than parade as Lord's of human labor and natural resources. 

It is indeed cruel and unjust punishment to exist without food clothing and shelter. Imagine some dogs are better fed and live in dog houses while people suffer the elements in tents and cardboard boxes. How long can this go on before revolution is full blown?

Look around the world and see the Danger Zone that the blind man Ray Charles sang about! Or listen to the Lou Rawls version of Tobacco Road.

--MARVIN X

12/18/19

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

Belated hapi b-day poem for Amina Baraka

Oh, when black was beautiful: Mrs. and Mr. Amina and Amiri Baraka

Amina Baraka
My revolutionary comrade

AB my comrade too

We brothers and sisters really

Beyond friends

United in revolutionary blood and joy

So many good times together

Coast to coast

Black house SF

Spirit house NewArk

Baraka house 10th Street

Dr. Molefe Asante, Mrs. Amina Baraka, Marvin X, Amiri Baraka, Jr., Kenny Gamble, the Philly Sound

My east coast home

So many years tears fears

See Baraka children grow

Ras become da mayor

Middy Jr Chief of staff

Ras Baraka, Da Mayor of Newark, New Jersey

Shani gone to lesbian heaven
Shani say Marvin X only man I like

Shani Baraka and her lover Rayshon, both fatal victims of domestic violence

AB smiling from Communist heaven

Dancing with Maya Toni

Sun Ra Coltrane

WEB

Robeson

Malcolm

808 10th Street quiet now

AB gone

Amina writes poetry alone

Free of AB's shadow

Wait till you hear her poems

Fire poems of love

There was Mandela

And there was Winnie

Don't mess with Amina

Like Winnie

Revolutionary terror

No first lady of Newark

Ras her son not husband

Rarely go to City Hall

Let them boys do they thing

Amina Baraka gotta sing

Red songs of revolution

Just don't mess with her children

Won't be no problem.
--MARVIN X
12/17/19

BLACK MUSLIM ATLANTIC

Thursday and Friday, January 30-31, 2020

“The Ruby” Arts Center

2020 Campus Drive

Duke University

This symposium was envisioned and organized with Imam AbdulHafeez Waheed to honor the Black Muslim community in North Carolina and beyond, its culture, literature, history, and legacy from slavery until the present. Black Muslim Atlantic pays tribute to the work and writings of Omar ibn Sayyid through a pioneering project by Professors Carl Ernst and Mbaye Lo to translate his writings and create a digital archive. The symposium showcases the work of these professors and their students from their course “Arabic and the Writings of Enslaved Muslims.” The term Black Muslim Atlantic was coined by Margari Aziza, the co-founder and program director of the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, as “an endeavor of transnationalism through literature, intellectual exchange, visual and performance art.” This work expands Paul Gilroy’s understanding of the Black Atlantic toward acknowledging the powerful role played by Islam in forging cultural and political solidarities across the global south. 

Scholarship that followed Gilroy’s text, by seminal thinkers like Sylviane Diouf, focused on the role of enslaved Muslims in sustaining the roots and routes severed by the middle passage and by brutal suppression. Yet as so many acknowledge, black Muslim cultural forms continued and continue to flourish, even under condition of duress—musical, poetic, linguistic, literary, artistic, and religious. Although popular perception sees music and poetry as outside Islamic orthodoxy, these forms have long functioned in intimate relation to the Islamic tradition. This symposium explores its more recent instantiations as reflective of that longer history of Islamic civilization, as much a renewing and reviving it for contemporary contexts.

This symposium focuses on these cultural forms as a way of fore-fronting the powerful role played by Islam and Muslims in a shared culture of the black Atlantic. Islam so often occupies a marginal position in the study of the black Atlantic, just as the study of the black intellectual tradition occupies a marginal position in Islamic studies. This symposium focuses on the intersection of these shared cultural traditions, bringing its rich history and thriving present into detailed focus. The symposium is in memoriam of C. Eric Lincoln, professor of Religious Studies at Duke—whose work on both black Muslims and race and religion helped pioneer the field and raise more nuanced consciousness about these subjects. This symposium explores how far the field has come from this earlier moment.

The project is jointly sponsored by Duke Islamic Studies Center, African and African American Studies, Asian and Middle East Studies, Forum for Scholars and Publics, Religious Studies, the Franklin Humanities Institute,  and by the After Malcolm Project at the Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University.

THURSDAY, January 30th 6 p.m.

WELCOME WORDS

Brother Joshua Salaam

Muslim Chaplain

Center for Muslim Life

Duke University

“Islam and the Blues”
Sylviane Diouf, Visiting Professor, Brown University, Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice

Author of:     Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (1998)

Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies (2003)

Dreams of Africa in Alabama: Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (2007)

Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (2014)

RESPONDENT:

Omar Ali, Dean of Lloyd International Honors College and Professor of Comparative African Diaspora History, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Author of:     In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886-1900 (2010)

Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean (2016)

Islam in the Indian Ocean World: A Brief History with Documents (2016)

Poetry Reading

Marvin X Jackmon

FRIDAY, January 31st 

9 a.m. coffee/breakfast

WELCOME WORDS

Mrs. Lucy Lincoln, Educator

C. Eric Lincoln’s widow

9:30-11:30 a.m.

“Islam and Race”

Zain Abdullah, Associate Professor of Religion, Temple University

Author of:     Black Mecca: The African Muslims of Harlem (2010)

A God of Our Own: Malcolm X and His Battle for the Soul of America (forthcoming)

Temple 25: Black Religiosity and the Rise of American Islam (forthcoming)

“Islam and Jazz” 

Richard Brent Turner

Author of:    Islam in the African American Experience

Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans

“Islamic Sounds: The Politics of Listening”

Jeanette Jouili, Associate Professor of Religious Studies

Author of:    Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe (2015)

The Islamic Artistic Scene in the UK: Between Religious Ethics and State Discipline (new project)

RESPONDENT: 

Mark Anthony Neal

James B. Duke Distinguished Professor and Chair of African and African American Studies, Duke

Author of:     Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2013)

Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003)

What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998)

BREAK 11:30 to noon

12:00 p.m. to 1 

“A Sea Without Shore”

Youssef Carter, College Fellow, Social Anthropology, Harvard University

The Vast Oceans: Remembering God and Self in Mustafawi Sufi Order (in progress)

& Rashida James-Saadiya, Arts and Culture editor for Sapelo

1 p.m. to 2 jumaa led by Imam AbdulHafeez Waheed & lunch

2 p.m.-3:30 

“Ahmad Karim & the Black Consciousness Movement at Morehouse:

Black Women Scholars Archiving Their Radical Parents”

Dr. Jamillah Karim

Professor of Religious Studies emerita, Spelman College

Author of:    American Muslim Women

Women of the Nation: Between Black Protest and Sunni Islam with Dawn-Marie Gibson

“Omar ibn Sayyid: Arabic and the Writings of Enslaved Muslims” course

Professor Carl Ernst, Religious Studies, UNC

Professor Mbaye Lo, Asian and Middle East Studies, Duke 

Bryan Rusch, student

3:30 p.m. 

CLOSING WORDS

Imam Ronald Shaheed

Assistant Imam, Masjid Ash Shaheed

Charlotte, NC

SPONSORS

Duke Islamic Studies Center, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department, Franklin Humanities Institute, Forums for Scholars and Publics, African and African American Studies Department, Religious Studies Department

Dr.Cornel West & Marvin X in Conversation