Off the Record, Marvin X, Sun Reporter Newspaper Political Columnist

Off the Record

2/13/20

By Marvin X

Sun Reporter Political Columnist

Poet/political columnist Marvin X in Newark NJ with the Baraka brothers,

left, Amiri Middy Baraka, Jr., Chief of Staff, right, the Honorable Mayor of Newark NJ, Ras Baraka

photo Mayor's Office

San Francisco Reparation leaders unite after Off the Record column

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.”

--Matthew 5:9

We are happy to announce that this column played a role in uniting the Reparations leadership in San Francisco, especially promoting the reconciliation of NAACP President Rev. Amos Brown and SF Supervisor Shamann Walton that was, we think, an intergenerational conflict. We understand that NAACP President Brown and Supervisor Walton will present a united reparations  proposal to the City and County of San Francisco for its history of racial discrimination and pervasive injustice as per the treatment of North American Africans in employment, education, housing, civil rights and police abuse under the color of law, among other issues. We are happy to see that these gentlemen realized the issue of reparations transcends their individuality and is a communal affair. With unity all things are possible and we are confident Reparations shall be forthcoming from the City and County of San Francisco. Mayor London Breed informed us she will support a unified proposal and the progressive group of SF Supervisors have indicated the same. The final proposal should be presented to the people who are descendents of Africans captured in the American slave system for their perusal to achieve the consent of the governed, with input from the wider community as well. Who will deny that African slave labor or chattel slavery is the foundation of American wealth and the wealth gap between the descendents of slaves and the desscendents of slave masters. North American Africans gave centuries of free labor that allowed surplus capital accumulation, thus it will take 228 years for North American Africans to achieve parity with the wealth whilte Americans enjoy today. It may take longer unless Reparations includes an emergency parity program to negate the toxic effects of gentrification and displacement that is full blown at this hour in San Francisco and throughout this nation. Let San Francisco be the model for Reparations. 

The Fall of Muhammad 

Dr John Henrik Clarke told us only consciousness and high morals will keep us from slipping down the precipice of hubris, greed and corruption. We all must transcend the world of make believe or conspicuous consumption that Dr. E. Franklin Frazier wrote about in his classic Black Bourgeoisie. 

We remember when Mohammad began his employment with the Department of Public Works several years ago. He was brought in to clean up the city and plant trees in the Johnny Appleseed fashion of greening the City of St. Francis. Apparently he  succumbed to the call of the Sirens, those haunting women in the Greek myth who induced Ulysses in Homer's Odyssey. But let it be known that Mr. Muhammad hired more grass roots people than any other project in the history of San Francisco, thus he departs with a legacy of goodness. Let him depart with his retirement for all the good he has done.  We wish him well!

The Impeachment of Donald Trump and the Devil in Book of Job

The Prez has survived impeachment and may be on his way to win a second term. 

We urge you not to be afraid of King Donald, for he is acting out the role God gave the Devil in the Book of Job. As a test, God told the devil he shall have a free rein to persecute Job as a test of faith, although he shall be able to kill Job. 

Is it not crystal clear the Devil Trump has been able to transcend all opposition, including impeachment. Asw per the Divine Plan, Trump must conclude his mission to torture and aflict any manner of pain and grief on Job or the righteous. Now it is not clear to us Trump’s opposition is righteous, for some of their antics are nefarious for political ends, but what about Job, i.e., the Negro, aka North American African, the primary agent to face God’s test with the devil. But do not neglect that the devil’s job is not only to afflict the North American African but the 85% of the people who are deaf, dumb and blind. The devil represents the 10% who are bloodsuckers of the poor. The 5% are the poor righteous teachers such as myself who are duty bound to wake up the deaf dumb and blind, no matter what color, ethnicity or gender. 

But who is Job as the central character in this Biblical drama played out in the final days of  Pax Americana? Job is the so-called Negro who was kidnapped, brainwashed, raped, tortured and terrorized until reduced from Kunta to Toby and accepted his job for life, yes, job as in Job. Even today, after 400 years of involuntary servitude, most so-called Negroes, aka North  American Africans, only want a job, sometimes called "a slave" (Gotta get to ma slave, man, later).

So although the idea of do for self or entrepreneurship is slowly creeping into his consciousness, especially after Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey and Elijah Muhammad, “Job” is coming to recognize only the glass ceiling awaits him/her, as did my darling daughter Muhammida El Muhajir realized after reaching the heights of corporate America (NIKE, William Morris Agency, et al.)  and departed to Ghana (See her interview with Al Jazeerah, Blaxit). She noted after graduating from Howard University with a B.S. in Microbiology on a track scholarship, "I ran track to be a winner. I am not going to stay in any race that I have no possibility of winning. Ghana may not have electricity 24/7 but they don't have white supremacy 24/7. I am not followed around in expensive stores, restaurants and hotels. I am black among my Black people!"

Bloomberg and Trump: Battle of the Billionaires

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

A little black bird tells us North American Africans will follow the money trail to Bloomberg, no matter his Stop and Frisk Nazism. Bloomberg will placate the Blacks with his personal reparations package of two dollars for every preacher who will distribute 50 cents to each congregant.

The little black bird says Blacks will not disturb Trump serving as the last hero of white nationalism as they drown in the chasm of white supremacy insanity. We suggest long term recovery for all of us suffering white supremacy type I (whites) and the other white people, i.e. blacks and other ethnicities and gender groups, including trysexuals (who try anything), suffering White supremacy/insanity Type II, as Dr. Nathan Hare has been diagnosed in his erudite deconstruction of the American psyche.

With Blacks money talks and bs walks. Blacks will not accept Adam and Steve in the White House. This is beyond the Black moral paradigm which is the only morality in Pax Americana. In his inescapable black manhood, despite his gayness, James Baldwin said to me in my 1968 interview at his New York apartment without heat in that cold December winter, “We’re the only thing that happened here! Nothing else happened here except us! It’s a wonder we all haven’t gone stark raving mad. It’s a miracle for a black father to raise a son in these circumstances, and I applaud the fathers who have done so time after time. Imagine, we are celebrating the Prince of Peace while they bomb the hell out of Vietnam. These people do not believe in Christianity nor the Prince of Peace, your condition proves it! Look at your condition!”

And the choice is Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But if you vote for me, I will set you free. Trump will make you great again. Bernie will give you everything free, a chicken in every pot. Bloomberg (stop and frisk) will give you Reparations from his personal bank account. Biden will be Obama in black face. Vote for me, I will set you free.

Tweedledee and Tweedledum are choices that are not choices, and so we go into the presidential election 2020 in a conundrum, lost and turned out on the way to Granny's house (the Whispers, Olivia). Demographically, America is at the precipice, the whites are dying out, literally, and the non-whites are baby booming, literally.

We thought Bernie Sanders had possibilities until he suggested African birth control to stop climate change, sounding like Margaret Sanger's birth control racism. But we may see the last white man as president of the United States, thus the desperation of the hour. Whites can see America is turning non-white, especially with Latinox. We can't hate white folks for fighting to make America white again, for it is but the continuation of their perennial delusional white supremacy mythology. Will the final battle of white men be Trump or Blumberg, the possible battle of the billionaire Tweedledee and Tweedledum. FYI, former President Obama fears Bernie Sanders will make Trump a shoe in. One thing we North American Africans know, freedom ain't free, so we know Bernie Sanders is talking poppycock. For sure free market capitalism is dying and shall ultimately be replaced with a fair market economy, devoid of raw capitalist exploitation of cheap labor and resources, often at gunpoint. Whether it shall be called socialism, communism or some other ism, except white-ism, remains to be seen.

As per  the housing crisis, we see housing will soon be recognized as a human right, thus the financialization or commodification of housing shall end. Even Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders ain't quite ready for this. But has any of the Tweedledee and Tweedledum presidential candidates offered a solution to the critical housing crisis? And why do we think capitalism is the panacea for all human needs? Remember that song Wake Up Everybody? Teachers got to teach a new way, preachers gotta preach a new way, and politicians got to jump out of the Left/Right paradigm. And beyond centrism as well. The Clintons killed centrism, among the other things/people they killed.

And what did Hillary say famously, "What difference does it make?"

We can speculate until the fog comes in, but you know in 2020, it's down to Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

Marvin X and the Baraka Brothers at NewArk NJ City Hall

Marvin X and the Baraka Brothers
The Brick City Model
Stay turned for X's report on his east coast book tour
NOTES OF ARTISTIC FREEDOM FIGHTER MARVIN X

NewArk NJ Mayor Ras Baraka in his office during interview with

Marvin X. Note photo on wall of Paul Robeson: Paul and Ras share same birthday.

photo Marvin X

Left to right: Amiri Middy Baraka, Jr., Chief of Staff, Marvin X and the 
Honorable Mayor Ras Baraka

photo Mayor's Office

Notes of Artistic Freedom Fighter Marvin X
Book Tour 2020

Before departing the East coast, we were blessed to interview both Baraka brothers. I've known them since they were baby boys and observed them growing up in the house of Mrs and Mr Amina and Amiri Baraka. 

MX and Amiri Middy Baraka, Jr., Chief of Staff of the Mayor

photo Mayor's Office

They are like my nephews. I'm so proud of them, even more proud after the people of NewArk informed me that under the Mayor Ras Baraka administration they feel a breath of fresh air now that the police have a positive symbiotic relationship with them. 

Mayor Ras Baraka and Marvin X at the beginning of his administration, 2014

Mrs. Amina Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Marvin X and Amiri Baraka RIP, at NYC's Riverside Church Memorial for Dr. Betty Shabazz, widow of Malcolm X, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz

photo Risassi

Stay tuned for my report on the East coast Wild Crazy Ride Of the Marvin X Experience. See my column in the Sun Reporter Newspaper: Off the Record, or go to www.blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com

FYI, New York's Pacifica Radio WBAI will broadcast a recorded interview with Marvin X in three parts beginning Tuesday, February 11, 6AM on the Morning Show with King Downing. He will also do a live interview with the indefatigable peripatetic poet who rocked the Brooklyn Commons Cafe on Sunday night, accompanied by Ngoma Hill on flute and violin. WBAI and the Zulu Nation co-sponsored this event.

Brother Shep of the Zulu Nation. When he heard Marvin X was on tour in Philly and NewArk, he was determined the poet was not going to leave NYC out of his tour. He connected with King Downing of WBAI and they co-sponsored his reading at the Brooklyn Commons Cafe.


Marvin X says, "My reading and talk at the Brooklyn Commons Cafe, especially being accompanied by Master Ngoma Hill on violin and flute, was the climax of my book tour. I must admit there is nothing like performing in NYC and the energy it commands of an artist. Performing with Ngoma Hill was a Sankofa moment, back and forward in time into the now. BAM artists know what to do when we connect on stage. We flow with the flow, no rehearsal needed. On the west coast, I have performed with violist Tarika Lewis and harpist Destiny Muhammad for over thirty years and we have never had a rehearsal.

I now have a clearer vision of my proposed performance in Oakland's BAMFEST 2020, Black August, with the Oakland Symphony conducted by Michael Morgan. We must include the Black Arts Movement Poets Choir and Arkestra, including BAM musicians from coast to coast. Sonia Sanchez has agreed to read with me as part of the Poet's Choir. As per musicians, my choices are Tarika Lewis on violin, Destiny Muhammad on harp, Tacuma King on percussion, Paul Smith on drums, and from the east coast, Ngoma Hill on violin, flute and the other 12 instruments he plays as well as his poetry. Can we leave out members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, Danny Thompson and band leader Marshall Allen, or perhaps the entire Arkestra. Some may recall Sun Ra and I did a five hour concert without intermission with a cast of fifty musicians, actors and dancers at the Harding Theatre, San Francisco, cerca 1972.

My main man, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, RIP

Edward Kamau Brathwaite obituary

Poet and academic who aimed to create a distinctively Caribbean form of poetry to celebrate the region’s voices and language

Lyn Innes

Wed 5 Feb 2020 13.49 ESTLast modified on Wed 5 Feb 2020 13.57 EST

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 Brathwaite insisted the language spoken by Caribbean peoples should be regarded not as a dialect, or an inferior form of English, but as a ‘nation language’ capable of expressing Caribbean culture and history. Photograph: University of Sussex

Edward Brathwaite, also known as Kamau Brathwaite, who has died aged 89, was a Caribbean poet and historian, praised by the American poet Adrienne Rich for his “dazzling inventive language, his tragic yet unquenchable vision, [which] made him one of the most compelling of late twentieth century poets”.

Brathwaite began composing and performing his best-known work, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973), while teaching and studying history in Jamaica and Britain in the 1960s. This epic trilogy traces the migrations of African peoples in and from the African continent, through the sufferings of the Middle Passage and slavery, and dramatises 20th-century journeys to the UK, France and the US in search of economic and psychic survival.

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The Arrivants exemplified Brathwaite’s ambition to create a distinctively Caribbean form of poetry, which would celebrate Caribbean voices and language, as well as African and Caribbean rhythms evoking Ghanaian talking drums, calypso, reggae, jazz and blues. Brathwaite argued that the iambic pentameter embodied the British language and environment; it was not a meter that could carry the experience of hurricanes, slavery and a submerged African culture.

In his History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (1984), Brathwaite contended that the English language spoken by the descendants of slaves in the Caribbean carried a suppressed African identity that surfaces in the way words are voiced and also in particular words, idioms and syntactical formations, such as “nam” for “to eat”, “i and i” for “we”, and “What it mean?” for “What does it mean?”.

His use of reggae rhythm and Rastafarian voice and idiom can be heard in Rights of Passage (originally published in 1967), the first book in The Arrivants trilogy:

Rise rise
locks-
man, rise
rise rise
leh we
laugh
dem, mock
dem, stop
dem, kill
dem, an go’
back back
to the black
man lan’
back back
to Af-
rica.

 Black + Blues, 1976, a poetry collection in three parts: Fragments, Drought and Flowers

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For Brathwaite, oral performance and a listening community were vital. Moreover, he insisted, the language spoken by Caribbean peoples should be regarded not as a dialect, or subsidiary and inferior form of English, but as a “nation language”, capable of expressing the complexities of Caribbean culture and history.

In later years, Brathwaite deployed a concept he termed “tide-alectic” or “tidalectic”, which he described as “the ripple and the two tide movement”. The term embodied his affirmation of a specific language and way of perceiving the world that rejected an analysis based in thesis, antithesis and synthesis, “the notion of dialectic, which is three – the resolution in the third”. It also connoted Brathwaite’s concern to move towards a sense of identity and continuity across oceans, rather than an identity grounded in one place or time.

After the 80s, Brathwaite’s publications featured his increasing interest in the use of different computer fonts and spacings to create strong visual effects on the page. He termed this form of concrete poetry Sycorax video style, and spoke of Sycorax (the silenced mother of Caliban) as the ghost who inhabited his machine. And whereas his early trilogies sought to express a collective Caribbean experience and identity, the later works became increasingly autobiographical, suggesting his own experience could be read as representative of contemporary African-Caribbean history.

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Brathwaite’s concentration on the African elements of Caribbean poetry and history differentiated him from other major Caribbean writers such as VS Naipaul, who focused on Indians who had been transplanted to the New World, and Derek Walcott, who claimed English literature (including the iambic pentameter) as equally part of his heritage.

It was a differentiation that at times became exaggerated and embroiled in the cultural and racial politics of the Caribbean islands. Brathwaite was a resolute nationalist: a sequel to The Arrivants is titled Mother Poem (1977), and declares Barbados as his motherland in opposition to England’s self definition as mother country to all her colonies.

Yet Brathwaite also expressed his debt to TS Eliot, noting that “what TS Eliot did for Caribbean poetry and Caribbean literature was to introduce the notion of the speaking voice, the conversational tone”. Like Eliot’s The Waste Land, The Arrivants seeks to express the quest of a whole society for spiritual healing through the deployment of a variety of voices, invoking past and present memories and loss, and continuing imagery of desert and water, sterility and fertility, within that quest.

Born Lawson Edward Brathwaite in Bridgetown, Barbados, he was the son of Hilton, a warehouse clerk, and Beryl (nee Gill), a talented pianist and one of the first black women to be employed as a clerk in Bridgetown. Edward attended Harrison college in the capital and was awarded a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, graduating in history in 1953 and gaining a diploma in education the following year. At Cambridge he also attended lectures by FR Leavis and became acquainted with his fellow Pembroke student and poet Ted Hughes.

 Ancestors, 2001, contains the trilogy Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self

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His appointment in 1955 as an education officer in what was then the Gold Coast saw Brathwaite witness Kwame Nkrumah coming to power and Ghana becoming the first African state to gain independence, which profoundly affected his sense of Caribbean culture and identity. There he also studied with the musicologist JH Nketia.

In 1960 Brathwaite married Doris Welcome, a teacher and librarian originally from Guyana. Together they started a children’s theatre in Ghana, for which he wrote several plays. From 1962 he took up teaching posts for the University of the West Indies (UWI), first in St Lucia, then in Kingston, Jamaica. Here he began writing Rights of Passage, and also published poems in the Caribbean literary journal Bim.

He began a PhD at the University of Sussex in 1965, with his dissertation published on The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (1971). In London he met other Caribbean intellectuals and artists, such as John La Rose, Andrew Salkey, Wilson Harris, Aubrey Williams and Stuart Hall, and became co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement, which met regularly in London and at the University of Kent between 1966 and 1972.

Returning to Jamaica, Brathwaite launched a journal of the movement, Savacou, in 1971. Awarded a fellowship to the University of Nairobi that same year, Brathwaite met the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose grandmother encouraged Brathwaite to take Kamau as his first name.

From 1982 to 1991 Brathwaite was professor of social and cultural history at the UWI. When Doris was diagnosed with cancer he began writing The Zea Mexican Diary (1993) as a tribute to her, “the perfect wife of/for the poet”. She died in 1986.

Made professor of comparative literature at New York University in 1992, Brathwaite subsequently lived in New York and Barbados. He served on the board of directors of Unesco’s History of Mankind project for more than 30 years. He was awarded the Neustadt international prize for literature in 1994. Other awards included the Griffin international poetry prize for his collection Born to Slow Horses (2006), the Bussa award, the Casa de las Américas prize, and the PEN/Voelcker award for poetry in 2018.

The scholar Louis James wrote of Brathwaite: “His passionate engagement with the culture of the common people in the Caribbean has had a liberating impact on postcolonial writers across the wider spectrum, freeing them to explore their experience in language and forms authentically their own.”

In 1998 Brathwaite married Beverly Reid. She survives him, along with his son with Doris, Michael, his granddaughter, Ayisha, and a sister, Joan.

• Edward Kamau Brathwaite, poet and historian, born 11 May 1930; died 4 February 2020