Monday, February 14, 2022
Monday, February 7, 2022
Comments on Outlaw Magazine's feature essay "The Mythology of Pussy and Dick" by Marvin X/El Muhajhir
Comments on Outlaw Magazine’s feature essay “The Mythology of Pussy and Dick” by Marvin X/El Muhajir
COMMENT Contents
Don’t judge a book by its cover, Delores Nochi Cooper
Marvin X in the Tradition, Lil’ Joe, RIP
Why Young Men and Women Need to Read MOPD, Rudolph Lews
Marvin X’s DNA, Fahizah Alim
Mr. Black Man, You don’t have a pussy!, Nisa Ra
Dear Marvin X, Kenyalyn Makone-Anunda
Confession of an Elder, Askia Toure
Notes from the Hip Hop Generation, Desirae Rosgen
Don’t judge a book by its cover
Delores Nochi Cooper
“Is Marvin X the only courageous one among us who dares ‘tell the truth and shame the devil’?”
–D. Nochi
Mythology of Pussy and Dick is a compilation of everything that Marvin X has written on the subject of sexuality in America. There are those who will miss this opportunity to receive wisdom from our brother because of the language he uses to describe the male and female anatomy, and that is a tragedy because this information is crucial for men and women who are suffering from a psycho-linguistic crisis and inflicting actual violence in their male/female and partner relations including same gender loving persons, and these dysfunctional interactions are witnessed by children who are the next generation of couples. Those same people who dare to judge his choice of words, linger in the comfort of their bedrooms watching violent shows on big screen TVs that depict graphic details of violence perpetrated against others, and call they it entertainment. If children learn more from what they see than what we tell them, how will they process and act upon the continued sexual chaos that is being manifested in our families and our society?
The author has proven himself to be a leader and a teacher who has the best interest of the community at heart. He speaks truth with language that can be understood by the least of us and the best of us. His credentials supersedes his education at some of the finest institutions in California; he embraced the system and defied the system; he was oriented in the Muslim tradition of polygamy as plural marriage (see his play In the Name of Love, Laney College Theater production 1981); he has held his own with intellectuals and psychopaths; and he has evolved in the words of James Sweeney “…from the muck and mire of hell clean as white fish and as black as coal”, and as a living testament.
We all have war stories to tell relationships gone bad. The difference between Marvin X and the rest of us is that Marvin X has lived that what he is speaking about, has survived it and is willing to talk about it, and holds nothing back narrated in language that will grab your attention.
Each story is rich with commentary which speaks to society’s attitudes about male and female relationships: rape, athletes, toxic love, crack house sex, women without men, language of love, religious persecution of women (a woman stoned); gay and lesbian youth, same sex marriage, and much more…
His method of writing parables as commentary about events in real time is ingenious. If you are a follower of his blog, then you know with each daily entry he not only provides us with happenings, locally and nationally, but he walks us through, and allowing us to take a look at those events from a historical and global perspective.
Marvin X has chosen to desensitize our society by using words like pussy and dick. Language is fluid and if it’s primary use is for communication, and if through words one fails to hit the target, then what is the point? It may be that the author is before his time, and in future generations, pussy and dick will become words of endearment, not relegated to the present negative connotations. Perhaps it will become a mantra chanted over and over as a pre-sex ritual. Why not? Lord knows we could use some more effective ways to get beyond reckless abandonment.
In this book, Marvin X demonstrates that he has a tender side, especially The Maid the Ho, the Cook. Lil Joe describes this story as “One of the most beautiful pieces about real love I’ve ever read. The image of ‘crack-heads’ as scandalous and without human dignity is destroyed by Marvin’s recollection of this sister with whom he fell in love”. Because the object of mx’s affection is a whore, there are those, and you know who you are, who will lose the essence of this story which addresses real feelings and real interactions between a man and a woman, perhaps, you have only loved when it was safe to do so. But all of us who have loved surely know that passion and feelings can at times be both spontaneous and unsolicited.
Is Marvin X the only courageous one among us who dares “tell the truth and shame the devil”?
Delores Nochi Cooper
Lil’ Joe on Marvin X in the Tradition
Marvin X, as an artist i.e. truth teller-trailblazer, you have always been cutting edge both in what you lived, experienced and the naked truth you bare in "emptying of Spirit out of itself" (as Hegel would put it) as did Trane's Offering. Very rare, and whether we all recognize it now or not we are fortunate to witness such openness and honesty, though it makes the smug uncomfortable in their fake comforts; show is the unessential masquerading as essential and therefore art as truth ripping off masks is often seen as dangerous exposure.
I was reading Delores Nochi's Introduction to your new contribution, Mythology of Pussy and Dick: Toward Healthy Psychosocial Sexuality, and thinking of what she observed: "Mythology of Pussy and Dick is a compilation of everything Marvin X has written on sexuality in America and the world. There are those who will miss this opportunity to receive wisdom from our brother because of the language he uses to describe the male and female anatomy, and his perceived objectification of women and men, and this is a tragedy because this information is crucial for men and women who are suffering from a psycholinguistic crisis inflicting actual violence upon lovers in their male/female and same gender loving relationships. These dysfunctional interactions are witnessed by children who are the next generation of couples....” I agreed with her and at the same time recalled the fate of those who preceded you in this undertaking – for instance the social scientist and psychologist Wilhelm Reich e.g. The Function of the Orgasm, Sexual Revolution and Sex-Pol [he was thrown into an American federal prison and his books burned in 1956, he died in an American prison in1957http://en.wikipedia/wiki/Book_burning#Wilhelm_Reich.27s_publications_.28by_U.S._Food_and_Drug_Administration.29
Also I thought of Lenny Bruce: Bruce served in the navy during World War II (1942-45) and began performing stand-up comedy in 1946. As he gained popularity in New York nightclubs, his brand of comedy shifted from impersonations to free-wheeling monologs satirizing religion and politics. He released several comedy albums and appeared occasionally on TV, especially as a guest of Steve Allen and Hugh Hefner. In 1961 he was arrested after a performance in San Francisco and charged with obscenity. Bruce was acquitted, but for the next few years he was frequently in trouble with the law for using raw language on stage -- a no-no back then. In 1964 he was convicted of obscenity in New York and jailed for a few months (in 2003 Governor George Pataki posthumously pardoned him). http://www.answers.com/topic/lenny-bruce
.
Delores' take on the depth and honest language of your work also made me remember the radical 60s and the writings of early contemporary feminists, such as the analysis of sexual biology by Anne Koedt The Myth of Vaginal Orgasm http://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/CWLUArchive/vaginalmyth.html
But more directly your artistic style and the Avant-Garde revolutionary love and rebellion poetry and music of Archie Shepp - in particular his Blase http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpE9SN81H6E
So! Your latest contribution here is evidence that the struggle continues! Thanks and stay strong!
--Lil Joe
Why our young men and women must read Marvin X’s MOPD, Rudolph Lewis
This book will be a great source by which young people can come to grips with their troubling sexuality. It will help move the internal conflicts from below the solar plexus to above the neck. For many young people, especially black men in their 20s and 30s, there is little more than hot amorphous vapor in that region. So-called urban lit is their bible in coming to grips with the violent urgings of their penis. I used to conceal my own risings with a jock strap. It took me some time to train myself to sit still: running after a woman, any attractive woman, was an addictive impact on the soul. Your teachings in this matter is a kind of how-to book, much needed within our oppressed communities where inordinate violence is turned within, on our women, on our children, and our reckless unfulfilled manhood.
--Rudolph Lewis, Editor, Chickenbones.com
On Marvin X’s DNA, Fahizah Alim
Another thing that can be said on your behalf is that you had good DNA to transmit to your children. And you selected good mothers to nurture your seed and rear your children while you were out and about struggling with your Nafs al-Ammara Bissu' (demons). Allah is the Best Knower. If you hadn't descended into "Hell" you wouldn't be able to understand the depth of the despair and desperation that encompasses so many of our Black Men, which also allows you to reach out to them and speak FOR them. Most often, it is the one who has experienced the most intense of life's experiences who is best able to produce great art that touches the heart. Can you imagine Aretha Franklin being able to sing " I Never Loved a Man" without having her heart crushed? To quote one appropriate old gospel hymn: "Must Jesus bear the Cross alone and all the World go Free? No, there's a cross for Everyone and there's a Cross for me."
--Fahizah
Mr. Black Man, You don’t have a pussy!, Nisa Ra
People write this word on the wall as if it is something dirty and nasty. How can the organ through which life is created be something nasty, not to be mentioned, as if it is vile?
And it ain't his--he don't have a pussy! When will men get this simple point?
We want to see people learn this information about themselves because there's other things to do in this world, responsibilities, other people depending on them--men need to stop thinking about how many pussies they can get with--how many women they have played when they have only played themselves--start doing what real men do--start constructing their place in the world--be there for their children--just as you are doing now, Muhajir (Marvin), helping your daughter with your grandson.
–Nisa Ra
Dear Marvin X,Kenyalyn Makone-Anunda
It is not often that I write commentaries but you asked for some feedback.
You will not remember me because so many people must have come by your table. However, the title of your book destabilized me so much so that I returned on Sunday - drove all the way from Delaware to purchase the $5 mythology series. I strive not to use graphic language in my speech so it is jarring to see it in text. I strive to avoid most graphic communicative language as much as possible, so I was surprised to find myself intrigued and captivated by the boldness of the title. It was an awkward experience to visit your table. Perhaps because I am researching female circumcision in Africa which was a rite of passage ritual for me at age 9.
We are a people coming to the truth too late. We have taught each other that one can only stand guard over their own soul and that we are unable to be our community's keeper . I speak to my daughter and two sons about the choices available to them today. I tell my children that they have absolute freedom of choice to do whatever action they desire. But I also tell them that what they do not have is the freedom to choose the consequences of those choices whether deliberate or unintentional. The laws of the universe; the laws of nature; and also the laws of society determine the consequences of our choices. I tell them the truth not so much that they will change the world but that they can protect, guard and armor themselves. Ultimately, we are all individually responsible for whatever choices we make.
Slavery and its aftermath did not happen in a vacuum. In Africa, Africans sold Africans into slavery; colonialism was only able to flourish because African chiefdoms worked against themselves and each other (then and now); its African women who accept and engage in polygamy (then and now); its African women who circumcise the girl child (then and now); it’s a black women beauty industry that mutilate ’s African hair (then and now); and the list could go on…... It’s not that I am without hope but it’s a lonely place to be when one can see past the rhetoric. Traumatized and broken, we are a people coming to the truth too late. In many, many areas of our lives the “horse has already left the barn.”
Perhaps there should be a Mythology Eight that attempts to address what could be done after the horse has left the barn…..?
Kenya
Kenyalyn Makone-Anunda
Confession of an Elder, Askia Toure’
Beloved Ones,
Forty years ago, I had a very backward, chauvinistic view of women, and battered and abused some good sisters. Like all such gender criminals, I projected my insecurities on my victims. Since then, I turned my hypocritical life around, but found that the obscene damage that I had done left deep scars. Many times we cry out in our contemporary pain,
after waking up and realizing our transgressions. But we must understand that there are laws in this grand Universe which operate whether we realize it or not. Eastern philosophy defines these laws as Karma. Yes, it is wonderful that we come to our senses, over many decades, and discover true maturity. However, that which was done in the Past might still affect our lives in the Present. I hope that we brothers all realize our past heinous acts were no better than the oppressors we continue to struggle against today. Many of us have been forgiven by our former mates. But can we forgive ourselves by walking a different Walk in this 21 Century New World? The youths and kids need us healed, and healing as fathers, brothers, uncles, elders and loving friends.
Truly we are the leaders that we have been hoping and praying for!
In Love and Struggle
Askia Toure
Sunday, February 6, 2022
Tuesday, January 25, 2022
J O H N C O L T R A N E - BLUE TRAIN ( FULL ALBUM )
Saturday, January 22, 2022
Tuesday, January 18, 2022
Monday, January 17, 2022
Thursday, January 13, 2022
Marvin X Living Black History
Marvin X and Friends will perform Living Black History 24/7. The Poet will be accompanied by poets, musicians and dancers at a venue near you
. TBA. Tentative date late February.
BVA Ona Move in San Leandro
Staff of BVA, Left to Right Desiree, Egyptsia, MX and Ari
Black Vendor Market
1680 E14th, San Leandro
Open daily
11AM-6PM
510-776-7671
It's time to Buy Black
Do 4 Self
Join the Black Street Vendors Association
We Ona Move 22
BVA 510-575-7148
We support:
Black Cultural Zone, East Oakland
Black Arts Movement Business District CDC, West Oakland
Berkeley Juneteenth Association Berkeley
Black Street Magazine, Voice of the Black Street Vendors Association, Bay Area
Fantastic Negrito Vendors Place, 34th and San Pablo Av., North Oakland
Monday, January 10, 2022
Staff of the Black Street Vendors Association, Bay Area, Notes by BVA Founder/Planner Marvin X
Note from Founder Marvin X:
Dear Friends, the thoughts I express below are my thoughts and not those of the BVA. As the Founder I take the liberty to express my thoughts but as the BVA is organized, we want the young team of leaders to speak for themselves since they are being prepared to assume full leadership of the BVA. I am thankful to know these young people are highly qualified to assume leadership of the BVA. With the guidance of Mutima Imani and myself, plus the support of the Black Arts Movement Business District, CDC, under the direction of Dr. Ayodele Nzinga, the support of Delores Nochi Cooper, Founder of the Berkeley Juneteenth Association, Inc., and Carolyn Johnson of the East Oakland Black Cultural Zone, CDC, we are confident the BVA leadership can navigate Bay Area Black entrepreneurs into the future.
FYI, the BVA is not limited to street vending. Our approach is holistic: vendors must invest to come up
(We have agreed to use the African/Caribbean Sou-sou investment method that allows each investors to have his/her turn to come up.)
We shall explore housing for vendors from a collective model.
We shall buy products collectively rather than individually. And we shall buy from each other as opposed to spending money with other than our own kind.
We shall consider Bit Coin and other monetary methods to avoid the sinking dollar that is backed by nothing except the ink on the paper. We shall employ barter as a traditional method of trade.
We are blessed to have a team of young people with skills in high finance so we are confident we can avoid the pitfalls of financial scams.
ASAP, we shall meet with the general membership to take our organization to the next level economically, politically and spiritually. We accept the Biblical dictum, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all things shall be added unto you."
Our purpose is to be the model of do for self entrepreneurship. We demand first class treatment of our customers and ourselves.
We call upon all Black Street Vendors to join the BVA to unify ourselves to make Good Trouble as Ancestor John Lewis said. All members must register to vote for political equity. We must be organized to combat those organized against us. As voters they can recall politicians and, when organized and registered, we can recall politicians as well. Vendors, join the BVA and register to vote. The ballot or the bullet. Fidel Castro said, "The weapons of today are not guns but consciousness!" The BVA rejects the crumbs the City of Oakland through the Dept of Parks and Rec is offering us. As first class citizens, we reject kibbles and bits offered not in the name of social justice and equity but to placate white citizen council lake residents and merchants who are determined to continue the age old tradition of denying Blacks full rights to enjoy Lake Merritt. The whites think we have no memory of their white supremacist tradition of denying Blacks the enjoyment of Lake Merritt. The BVA shall not waste our energy in fruitless political battles to enjoy the mess of pottage the Parks and Rec conspires to allocate at. the behest of City Hall, Lake Merritt White Citizen Council, (along with a few whites dipped in chocolate called post black negroes who are neither post black nor negroes but colonial elites in the best manner of African neo-colonialism, just as President Obama was a neo-colonial negro, yeah, I said it and mean it and don't give a damn about your cancel culture or your economic black listing, alas, we have suffered house arrest, prison, exile, attempted assassination for the last half century from the Left and the Right, Twiddledum and Twiddledee).
I repeat, America just passed its annual $700 billion dollar national defense budget while the Democratic and Republican parties sang Silent Night.
Oakland Black Street Vendors attempted to vend at Lake Merritt during Covid for economic survival but our presence was anathema to lake residents. The Oakland murder rate and the thousands of homeless are quite acceptable to the blood suckers of the poor. Again, I call upon Black Street Vendors to find spaces in the downtown area or in the hood to deliver food and necessary items to our people. And we reject the protests of Arab grocers and liquor store owners who never consider hiring our people but short change and take advantage of our woman for sexual pleasure but if we reciprocate they charge us with violating their family honor. It is time we step up to the front line to demand the respect of our women and young girls. Let me paraphrase Ancestor James Baldwin, "The sexual abuse of our children will not make your children safe." I remember when a young female student of mine asked me to intervene with an Arab because he had shortchanged her. I went into the store in East Oakland chanting, "Ahlan wa sahlan. La ee la hah ee lah el lah. Muhammandan Rasullah." The Arab said he would return my students money only because I chanted Arabic. We think if I had come into his store chanting "You sand nigger motherfucker, don't you ever shortchange my sister again, bitch as motherfucker!", I think he would have given her the proper change as well.
You want me continue or shut up? FYI, I am not anti-Arab. In fact I am pro-Palestinian. I want to see a Palestinian state just as I want to see a Black State under the sovereignty of North American Africans with sufficient reparations for the next 50 to 100 Years, with access to the sea and air. We might need a doom system like the Zionist so we don't suffer another Black Wall Street or a bombing like the Philly destruction of the Move Movement.
Hell no, we don't trust white people or white niggas. In the Kenyan liberation struggle, the Mau Mau had to kill more reactionary uncle tom Africans than British colonialists.
We got some niggas in America whiter than the white man. Malcolm told you the house negroes say boss is we sick? And what did Harriet Tubman say, "I could have freed more slaves if they had known they were slaves!"
--Marvin X/El Muhajir
1/9/22
Friday, January 7, 2022
Coming Soon from Black Bird Press, Outlaw Magazine, Black History Edition, February, 2022
Outlaw Magazine
Journal of poet, philosopher, planner, organizer, educator Marvin X/El Muhajir
Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2022 Donation $20.00
Special in this Black History issue
Mythology of Pussy and Dick
His poetic and prose notes deconstructing partner relations in the #MeToo Era
ALSO
Marvin X interviews Dr. Cornel West on Black History
Notes on unveiling the bust of Dr. Huey P. Newton in West Oakland
Outlaw Marvin X
Wanted by the Thought Police
Described variously as a danger to society, the human earthquake, a tsunami, the sledgehammer. Deported from Belize, Central America, “Your presence is not beneficial to
the welfare of the British Colony of Honduras!”--Minister of Home Affairs, 1970
“I want him off campus (Fresno State University) by any means necessary.”
–Governor Ronald Reagan, 1969
“He walked through the muck and mire of hell but came out clean as white fish and black as coal!”--James W. Sweeney, RIP
His topics range from global politics and economics to those between men and women in their household. Common sense dominates his thought. He shuns political correctness for the truth of life. 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 we might be his beneficiaries. We are blessed to still have him among us. If you want to reshape (clean up, raise) your consciousness, this is a magazine to savor, to read again and again—to pass on to a friend or lover.
--Rudolph Lewis, Chickenbones.com
“Marvin X was one black man who met the white man in the center of the ring and walked with him to the corners of psycho-social inequity, grappling with him through the bowels of the earth, yet remained one black man the white man couldn’t get.”
–Dr. Nathan Hare, Sociologist, Clinical Psychologist, Father of Black and Ethnic Studies
OUTLAW MAGAZINE Contents
Master Teacher Marvin X after his lecture/discussion with students at UC Merced
Contents
Preface to The Language of Love
The Language of Love
Malcolm and Betty, A Love Song
Pay Yo Pussy Bill
Comment
After Da Nut Den What
Comment
Interview with Dr. Cornel West on Black History
What is Love
Letter to parents on loss of a child
Dear Mama
Pimping and Spirituality
Parable of the Pitbull
Why I gotta be a bitch cause I don’t wanna give a nigga my pussy?
On the unveiling of Dr. Huey P. Newton bust in West Oakland
You don’t know me
Comment
When lovers talk
The Rapture or I will go into the city
Parable of Creativity and Sexuality
Don’t Say Pussy
Mythology of Pussy and Dick, Original Essay, 2009
Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo
Should Every man confess sex guilt
Comment by Dr. Nathan Hare
Parable of a Real Woman
Comment
Confession of Ex-wife beater
I shot him
The other woman speaks
Polygamist raps
Partner Violence, A Pauline Conversion
Land of My Daughters
The New Black Man
Marvin X after lecture/discussion at his alma mater, San Francisco State University. He
Discussed Hip Hop and the Black Arts Movement in Davey D’s class.
Michael Shoatz, Jr. and Marvin X in Philly. Michael Shoatz, Sr. recently joined the Ancestors shortly after his release from prison
Former Black Panther Russell
‘Maroon’ Shoatz Dies 52 Days
After Being Released from 50
Years In Prison
Former Black Panther and political prisoner Russell “Maroon” Shoatz has died at the age of 78. The activist, who was also a Black Liberation Army member, succumbed to cancer on Dec. 17, 52 days after being released from prison.
The death announcement on Dec. 23 revealed a judge granted him a “compassionate release” on Oct. 26 due to stage 4 colorectal cancer. The court allowed him to relocate from a Pennsylvania state prison to hospice care for treatment.
Shoatz’s son, Russell Shoatz III, spoke to the press about the prison’s inability to properly care for his father and that his release speaks to that inadequacy. He said, “What’s in the transcripts are the evidence that the prisons don’t have the capabilities to take care not just of their healthy prisoners.”
“They definitely don’t have the ability to take care of their geriatric prisoners,” he continued. “And that they have effectively killed my father.”
His funeral service and Janazah prayer were held on Monday, Dec. 20, at the Philadelphia Masjid in West Philly. He was laid to final rest at the Friends Southwestern Burial Ground in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania.
Shoatz had been incarcerated for 50 years after receiving a life sentence for an attack on a Philadelphia police station in 1970. The altercation left one officer wounded and another one dead.
Advocates working to change life without parole rules call such sentences Death by Incarceration. Shoatz dedicated much of his life to this work. In 1983, the Amsterdam News reports, he became president of the Pennsylvania Association of Lifers (PAL). This collective lobbied to abolish life-without-parole sentences and solitary confinement.
During his imprisonment, he earned the nickname “Maroon,” based on the African-Jamaican group that self-emancipated from Spanish slavery in 1655 (after the British acquired the land) and established a community in the mountains of the island. Shoatz escaped twice: once in 1977 and again in 1980. After being brought back the second time, he was placed in solitary confinement.
He stayed in solitary confinement for 22 consecutive years from 1992 to 2014.
After release from solitary confinement, he sued the Department of Corrections for cruel and unusual punishment. From the state, he received $99,000 in damages and a permanent reprieve from solitary confinement.
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His Black Consciousness Program Rocked the Bay Area like no other black panthers black arts black studies kwanza Khalid Ab...