Wednesday, June 29, 2016
Book: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbiuktu by Joshua Hammer
The Great Rescue in Timbuktu
Abdel
Kader Haidara in Timbuktu with ancient manuscripts from Mali, Niger,
Ethiopia, Sudan, and Nigeria, September 2009. Haider was instrumental in
saving the manuscripts during the militant Islamist takeover of
Timbuktu in 2012.
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts
by Joshua Hammer
Simon and Schuster, 278 pp., $26.00
1.
On March 1, the International Criminal Court at The Hague formally charged Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, one of the leaders of the 2012 Islamist takeover of the Malian city of Timbuktu, with destroying the city’s cultural heritage—the first such international indictment. During June and July of that year, al-Mahdi took part in attacks on the mausoleums of Timbuktu’s Muslim saints, shrines that were deemed heretical under the strict Salafist religious code the occupiers tried to impose on the city. Using pickaxes, al-Mahdi and his group demolished the mud-brick buildings that had stood for five or six centuries and were central to Timbuktu’s rich cultural history.Among the targets of al-Mahdi and his fellow jihadists was the fifteenth-century Sidi Yahya Mosque; the jihadists smashed a sacred door that, according to long-held beliefs, would remain closed until the world’s last day.
The court’s decision to prosecute an act that victimized buildings, not people, says much about the West’s evolving response to radical Islamic jihad, and about the special significance of Timbuktu for the preservation of Islamic architecture and writings. In places like Afghanistan’s Bamiyan cliffs and the Syrian city of Palmyra, jihadists have tried to purge the historical record of what they regard as idolatrous or impure; both sites were mentioned by prosecutors at al-Mahdi’s hearing. Not mentioned there was another vicious act of destruction, aimed at the core of Timbuktu’s unique identity.
As jihadis retreated from the city, fleeing a French intervention that began in the first weeks of 2013, they set fire to thousands of centuries-old books in the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research. It was not the contents of the books the jihadis resented—many were in fact Korans, or Koranic exegeses—but apparently, as Joshua Hammer writes in his new book The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, the historical tradition from which they sprang: a golden age of literacy, learning, and intellectual debate at the heart of Islamic West Africa.
Timbuktu
was founded in the twelfth century by traders traveling along
trans-Saharan routes and the great Niger River; its population was a
blend of Arabs, Foulani, Songhay, and Tuaregs, and the city soon became a
remarkably cosmopolitan and tolerant place. Income from tariffs, and
from nearby salt and gold deposits, made it rich as well. Just as in
Florence at the same time, merchants in thirteenth- and
fourteenth-century Timbuktu began spending their wealth on
manuscripts—not the bound codices of Europe and Byzantium, but loosely
gathered folios, their initial letters often beautifully illuminated,
held together in leather folders or tied with string. Handwritten texts
on both sacred and secular topics, mostly in Arabic but a few in Greek
or Hebrew, flowed into Timbuktu from Egypt, North Africa, and Spain,
soon followed by blank Italian paper for the use of native writers and
copyists.
Learned debates on astronomy, law, and theology, and precious
chronicles of otherwise unrecorded local history, were among the
important texts. Private libraries flourished. In the late sixteenth
century the great scholar and writer Ahmed Baba claimed that his
collection of 1,600 volumes was small for its time.
This efflorescence of study and the written word lasted for over two centuries, as two successive West African states, the Mali and Songhay empires—both of which granted to Timbuktu a remarkable degree of autonomy—were able to maintain stability in the region. But internal divisions weakened the Songhay dynasty, and in 1591 a mercenary army sent from Morocco crossed the desert and conquered the city. Timbuktu came under harsh rule and the age of book production came to an end.
Ahmed Baba, in the middle of his long career as a writer, was imprisoned for suspected disloyalty by the Moroccan rulers of West Africa; his library was plundered and dispersed.
But other manuscripts remained, preserved from decay by the dry Saharan climate and stashed away by families who, in many cases, no longer read or understood them. They remained in tin trunks and camel-skin satchels as Timbuktu declined into a place whose name came to stand for distance and inaccessibility. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries French colonial authorities took over local property. This made manuscript owners more wary and drove the texts deeper underground—in some cases quite literally, since burying them beneath the desert sand proved an effective way to protect them from termites.
Few
outsiders knew about the Timbuktu manuscripts when Mali became
independent in 1960. But after a UNESCO delegation visited Timbuktu in
1964, the organization took steps to gather and preserve the scattered
volumes. A manuscript library was established, named for the great
bibliophile Ahmed Baba. It was this institution, along with many of the
saints’ shrines in the city, that the jihadists who took over northern
Mali tried to destroy in 2012 and early 2013 under the leadership of
Salafist zealots, among them Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi.
2.
By then Joshua Hammer, a Berlin-based journalist who has written about Mali in these pages as well as for Smithsonian and National Geographic, had become intensely interested in the manuscripts. On an initial visit to Timbuktu in 2006, Hammer reported on efforts to collect and preserve them and met Abdel Kader Haidara, a leading staff member of the Ahmed Baba library. Six years later, the unassuming Haidara, responding to the pressures of the jihadist takeover of northern Mali, would turn out to be one of the heroic “bad-ass” librarians of Hammer’s title.Haidara’s father, master of one of Timbuktu’s many small, in-home schools, had collected manuscripts since well before the Ahmed Baba Institute was founded. He was continuing a family tradition that went back many generations. After the elder Haidara’s death in 1981, the executor of his will told a surprised seventeen-year-old Abdel Kader that he had inherited his father’s library, at that time stored in a set of footlockers inside a closet. Abdel Kader had intended to become a livestock trader, not a preserver of books, but he slowly accepted a responsibility for which he had felt no special calling.
The director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, sensing that bibliophilia ran in the Haidara line, persuaded Abdel Kader to join his staff as a manuscript hunter. The institute’s collection began to swell, as did its reputation abroad. New funding, mostly from Middle Eastern governments hoping to preserve Islamic history, allowed Abdel Kader to be generous when buying books from the wary villagers. In one transaction with a Tuareg nomad, Haidara bought a trunkful of volumes for twenty times what the man had first asked for. By the next morning, Tuaregs from all over the region had dug manuscripts out of their hiding places and brought them, stuffed into skin sacks, to Haidara’s door.
A chance visit by a television crew filming Wonders of the African World, a PBS -sponsored travelogue, brought Henry Louis Gates Jr. to the Ahmed Baba Institute, and suddenly new doors began opening for Haidara in America and Europe. Grants from the Ford and Andrew Mellon foundations funded new buildings where the manuscripts could be studied and preserved. Visitors began arriving, often having learned that a highly literate, scholarly culture had flourished for centuries in sub-Saharan Africa; many had assumed that writing had only arrived with European colonization. “These are books written by black people?” Gates had asked Haidara during his visit. He was assured that some indeed were. The exchange was later broadcast in the first episode of Wonders of the African World, and as the camera panned over shelf upon shelf of dusty folios, Gates commented: “The mind of the black world, locked into the pages of these priceless books…. Evidence of a great civilization, untranslated and unknown.”
The very effort to gather and preserve the manuscripts only made them a more visible target when, early in 2012, a military force led by radical Islamists arrived in Timbuktu. Hammer traces the origins of that uprising and describes three of its leaders: Mokhtar Belmokhtar and Abdel-hamid Abou Zeid, both Arabs, veterans of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb ( AQIM ); and a Malian Tuareg named Iyad Ag Ghali, formerly the leader of a Tuareg separatist movement. An alliance between the Tuaregs and AQIM had created a powerful rebel army dominated by the three leaders. Rich with funds paid by European governments as ransom for victims of kidnapping, and having obtained weapons from Libyan arsenals after the fall of Muammar Qaddafi, they were emboldened to launch a jihad against Mali’s democratically elected government. They hoped to found an ISIS -like state and attract militants from West and North Africa.
This was not the first time that Timbuktu had faced a jihad. In the first decade of the nineteenth century in what is now Nigeria, the jihadist Usman dan Fodio established the Sokoto Caliphate, a powerful empire connecting thirty different emirates across much of West Africa. Timbuktu was not part of this empire; but inspired by the success and growth of the caliphate, the preacher Seku Amadu tried to establish his own jihadist empire and in 1825 conquered Timbuktu. During his reign European explorers were banned from the city. But the city’s milder, more tolerant strain of Islam, with its reverence for shrines and its love of annual festivals, prevailed. According to Hammer, when invading jihadis proclaimed their campaign of religious reformation in 2012, the imam of the Sidi Yahya Mosque said, “How dare you say you’re going to ‘teach us Islam’? We were born with Islam. We have had Islam in this city for one thousand years.” The jihad leader Iyad Ag Ghali responded by saying, “We’re going to have to replace the imams in this town.”
Ghali
interests Hammer as a case study in the often mysterious origins, both
personal and global, of jihadism. His Sufi background, his fondness for
music and Western-style dance clubs, and his purely secular devotion to
the cause of Tuareg rights seemed to make him an unlikely convert to the
Islamist cause. But missionaries from Pakistan convinced him to join
Tablighi Ja’amat, a fundamentalist movement advocating strict adherence
to their interpretation of the Prophet Muhammad’s tenets. Ghali
abandoned music and began practicing a harsh asceticism. In late 2007 he
took a post at the Malian consul in Saudi Arabia in order to be near
the Great Mosque. There, he adopted the views of al-Qaeda. Both Manny
Ansar, a close friend in Mali with whom Ghali had once shared a passion
for music, and the American ambassador Vicki Huddleston futilely tried
to persuade Ghali not to become an ascetic radical jihadist. Hammer, for
his part, feels unable to explain Ghali’s decision.
Before
his transformation into a holy warrior, Ghali had helped organize a
concert series in the Malian desert, and that event led to the yearly
musical festival outside Timbuktu at a village called Essakane. Hammer
devotes one of his best chapters to the events of 2012, when that year’s
festival closely coincided with the launching of the rebel campaign
that would, within a few months, threaten Malian territory as far south
as the capital, Bamako. During the preceding decade Essakane, where
artists like Robert Plant and Jimmy Buffett jammed with native Tuareg
bands, had inspired talk of a Woodstock in the desert. “Swords turn to
guitars,” wrote the MTV founder Tom Freston in Vanity Fair after
attending the 2007 festival. But radicalized Tuaregs and many Islamists
had come to regard Essakane as a “Sodom and Gomorrah” of alcohol, drugs,
and illicit sex. By 2012, when Bono performed there—arriving, as Hammer
writes, in a well-appointed private jet, “a cocoon of privilege,
wealth, and celebrity”—the perimeter of the festival had to be protected
by armored vehicles and elite troops.
Was the Malian government’s support of this and other music festivals, and of Western tourism, a cause of the attempted Islamist takeover? Hammer stops short of saying so, but his juxtaposition of Essakane’s success with the launch of the rebellion suggests that it may have had a part. After a joint performance with the Tuareg band Tinariwen, Bono climbed back into his luxury jet, proclaiming that “music is stronger than war.” But Iyad Ag Ghali and his new Arab allies were at that moment preparing an assault on a remote army camp to the north. Ghali’s forces captured and executed ninety government soldiers and started an aggressive advance toward Bamako. Mali’s president, Amadou Touré, was ousted in a military coup in March and the country descended into chaos. Unwilling to undermine Timbuktu’s relatively new status, he had insisted that the show go on at Essakane, even assigning to it the presidential guard troops that later turned against him.
When
the militants arrive in Timbuktu, proclaiming it the capital of
Azawad—an independent Tuareg state—the story of Abdel Kader Haidara and
his manuscripts merges with that of the jihadist triumvirate. Haidara
and his fellow librarians witnessed the imposition of harsh versions of
sharia law, including stonings, amputations of hands, and a ban on
broadcasting music. A large collection of cassette tapes of traditional
songs recorded in neighboring villages was destroyed. Haidara worried
that his books would suffer a similar fate, yet the jihadists seemed
strangely indifferent to them. Even though some of the jihadists were
assigned quarters in the Ahmed Baba Institute itself, they seem not to
have recognized the special meaning the books held, both for Timbuktu
and for the Western nations that had pledged funds to preserve them.
Though no immediate threat was apparent, the Timbuktu librarians decided, presciently as things turned out, that the entire collection must be moved. Hammer describes how almost all of the books were carefully packed into specially made tin storage lockers, then brought south by truck and canoe, past brigades, bandits, and the military checkpoints of both jihadist and Malian government forces. Thanks to Haidara’s orchestration by cell phone of the complex operation, and the funds that allowed him to buy off those who stood in their way, not a single manuscript was lost en route to Bamako, a city then thought to be safe from the jihadist threat.
As this rescue effort was taking place, the French began the military attack known as Operation Serval, sweeping up from the south in an effort to drive the militants away from Bamako and, ultimately, into the desert north of Timbuktu. Hammer’s account of this operation is tense and urgent. He convincingly shows what was at stake in Operation Serval, and how great a risk was taken by France, both militarily and politically, to support the elected government of its former African colony. The lessons of that intervention have not been lost on policymakers now struggling with the rise of ISIS in Libya, not far from Mali’s northern borders, and with its power over parts of Iraq and Syria.
Hammer’s
tale ends on a note of very qualified triumph. Timbuktu freed itself
from Islamist domination in January 2013 and music was again heard on
local radio stations, but life did not return to normal. Northern Mali
had been freed from a brutal, punishing regime, but kidnappings and
suicide bombings continue there today.
The Essakane festival has been
canceled for the year. Iyad Ag Ghali and a group of his fighters have
retreated to a desert oasis on Mali’s northern frontier. And Abdel Kader
Haidara remains in Bamako, where he holds a great many manuscripts,
uncertain when he can return them to the Timbuktu libraries built to
preserve them. The books may have been saved from fire, but they are now
threatened by mildew and rot from Bamako’s humid air.
Though
liberated, Timbuktu has become yet one more front, another red zone cut
off from the outside world. Its mausoleums have been rebuilt with the
help of foreign aid, but no visitors from abroad now risk kidnapping in
order to see them. The sources of Timbuktu’s vitality—the connections to
travel and trade that once made it a meeting place for West Africans
and a haven for writing and learning—have been destroyed, and Hammer’s
book, to its great credit, makes us see what a loss that is.
----------------------------------
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
www.blackeducator.org
www.blackeducator.blogspot.com
If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor. (Haiti)
--------------------------------------------
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
www.blackeducator.org
www.blackeducator.blogspot.com
If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor. (Haiti)
--------------------------------------------
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Kujichagulia on Gentrification
Gentrification and “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”
by Kujichagulia
Kujichagulia
In 1963, former governor of Alabama, George Wallace, delivered his infamous inauguration speech declaring, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Fast forward more than half a century later. America boasts of being a post-racial society, yet segregation remains an American epidemic. From colonization to plantations, reservations, ghettos, border patrols, and gated communities of insecurity forever whistling Dixie and protecting the Confederacy, America is determined to go down singing, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”
In 1963, former governor of Alabama, George Wallace, delivered his infamous inauguration speech declaring, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Fast forward more than half a century later. America boasts of being a post-racial society, yet segregation remains an American epidemic. From colonization to plantations, reservations, ghettos, border patrols, and gated communities of insecurity forever whistling Dixie and protecting the Confederacy, America is determined to go down singing, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”
Although the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 prohibited segregation, mere
legislation cannot regulate bigotry, ignorance, hatred, fear, or inhumanity. Instead of achieving desegregation, thus began half a century of “White flight” from major cities across the country
to newly established suburbs where housing, education, liberty and justice were denied to all Melanites (non-Whites). The
Kerner Commission Report of 1968
addressed the practice and politics of White flight stating “America’s
social norm of segregation and exclusion leads to one obvious conclusion
– “Our nation is moving toward two societies,
one black, one white - separate and unequal.”
In spite of an exodus from the
cities in search of nuevo-segregation elsewhere, myopic dreams of
perpetual privilege gave way to the stark realization that white-flight
did not improve the quality of white life. Although
white-flighters were able to avoid being neighbors to any Melanites,
they couldn’t avoid the two- to five-hour segregated commutes that
dominated their morning and evening routines from white-washed suburbia
to the chocolate/brown cities they abandoned in
favor of sustaining segregation and tolerating racism from the
sidelines. Once antebellum dreams of racially-sanitized suburbs morphed
into daily nightmares of refilling gas tanks for bumper-to-bumper
commutes with intoxicating vehicle exhaust, crowded carpools,
expensive toll booths, and random acts of road rage, white-flight
shifted into reverse.
The solution –
gentrification! Based on the rules of segregation, gentrification
displaces Melanite (non-White) families from their homes, communities,
and cities so that the gentry (wealthy White class) can relocate back
into the cities. As a result,
foreclosures, redlining, escalating prices, and exorbitant rents force
many Black and Hispanic people/families out of Oakland, as well as many
metropolitan cities nationally. Rising property taxes are pricing
long-established families out of their homes. Caucasians
are consistently awarded with homes and home loans, while Blacks and
Hispanics are routinely denied homes and home loans. Likewise, Blacks
and Hispanics are generally denied home improvement loans. Moreover,
Blacks and Hispanics are often charged exorbitant
interest rates on the home loans eventually attained. The result … more
segregation.
In February of 2016,
the document, ECONOMIC EQUITY: LOCKED OUT OF THE MARKET / POOR ACCESS TO
HOME LOANS FOR CALIFORNIANS OF COLOR, revealed an unwavering commitment
to segregation and racism in the 21st century. According to journalist,
Wile, “The study, co-produced by the Greenlining Institute and Urban Strategies Council, found
that in 2013, the top-twelve lenders helped African American borrowers purchase a mere
four homes in Oakland, while Hispanic borrowers received just
seven
home purchase loans.” The Rob Wile article,
Another mortgage lender just settled charges that it discriminated against blacks and Hispanics for years
(http://fusion.net/story/141197/another-mortgage-lender-just-settled-charges-that-it-discriminated-against-blacks-and-hispanics-for-years/),
San
Bruno, Calif.-based Provident Funding Associates is accused of charging
14,000 minority borrowers interest rates and broker fees that were on
average hundreds of dollars, and at times thousands, higher
than what white borrowers paid. The practice started as early as 2006
and lasted through at least 2011, according to the Justice Department’s
complaint.” Yet it is what it is; it's business as usual; life goes on,
et cetera. While gentrification guarantees
increased segregation under the guise of urban improvement; it's merely
business as usual. It's the same ole progressive racism that
patriotically fulfills America's prophecy of “segregation now,
segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”
(Reprinted from the SF Examiner Online
http://www.examiner.com/ethnic-community-in-oakland/kujichaguliaphavia-kujichagulia)
Black Bird Press News & Review: Marvin X at the San Francisco's Juneteeth 2016 in Fillmore
Black Bird Press News & Review: Marvin X at the San Francisco's Juneteeth 2016 in Fillmore
See Herb Boyd's article on the G word in Harlem. Marvin X's brief remarks at SF Juneteenth give a sense of gentrification out West. The West Oakland cultural district on 7th Street is no more. The Fillmore is no more and Harlem is fading rapidly as the Cultural Capital of Black America. Brother Muhammad at the Schomburg Library feels the essential monuments in Harlem will remain. Nothing of West Oakland remains nor does anything in the Fillmore.
See Herb Boyd's article on the G word in Harlem. Marvin X's brief remarks at SF Juneteenth give a sense of gentrification out West. The West Oakland cultural district on 7th Street is no more. The Fillmore is no more and Harlem is fading rapidly as the Cultural Capital of Black America. Brother Muhammad at the Schomburg Library feels the essential monuments in Harlem will remain. Nothing of West Oakland remains nor does anything in the Fillmore.
Herb Boyd on the G word in Harlem
How 'the G Word' is Translated in Harlem
[Opinion] Speaking to people who live in the storied New York community, gentrification means good things to some and bad things to others. It just depends on who you ask and how long they've been there
St. Nicholas Ave at 116th Street, Harlem, New York. Photo: Jim Henderson via Wikimedia Commons
Once upon a time in the nation's socioeconomic matrix, Black activists
once took to the ramparts challenging the advance of urban renewal, or
as they called it “Negro removal.” Nowadays the issue is gentrification
and with summer officially here we can expect a series of rallies in
Harlem from groups hotly contesting the changes occurring in the
residential and commercial sectors.
Say gentrification, or the “G word,” to some Harlem residents and they
are ready to march with a sign saying that “Harlem is not for sale.” Ask
others, as I have done for years in the community, and the responses
are mixed. So much depends on who you ask, how old they are, and how
long they have lived in Harlem.On the block where I live in Sugar Hill there used to be nine eyesores or dilapidated brownstones when we moved in the early 1990s. Today, only two remain. Most of the homeowners on the block welcomed the arrival of new people who could fix up the buildings, paying little regard to race. The only thing that mattered for them was that the decaying buildings would be occupied and renovated.
To speak to them of displacement, a word often associated with gentrification, had no meaning whatsoever to my neighbors. The buildings had been vacant and abandoned for years. For the most part, the renewal had very little to do with the displacement of a family.
Many of our new neighbors are disproportionately White, which has not alarmed most of the residents. In fact, they appreciate the role the newcomers have played in commanding attention from downtown. While there is no scientific proof that complaints from White residents mean more, it seems that they do. While many longtime residents have complained about the potholed streets, a need for speed bumps, stop signs, garbage pickup, efficient mail delivery, and faster service in the post office, apparently the cry from White Harlemites, particularly those on the community boards, is being heard by the city’s leaders.
This is not to negate the influx and influence of new young Black residents, and certainly their concerns paired with their White counterparts bring additional clout.
More good news comes from elders who are pleased to have the major retail giants move into the vicinity. Whole Foods, Fairway, Duane Reade, Rite Aid and other chain stores make it easier for senior citizens to get quality food and prescriptions without having to venture to midtown. The elders often mourn the disappearance of the Black-owned mom and pop stores, but many of those spots were replaced by bodegas owned by people in various other ethnic groups and not by the giant retail stores.
So, is gentrification a myth?
No way, says Nellie Bailey, who, as the leader of the Harlem Tenants Council, has been tireless in her fight against the invasion of gentrification. “Across the country, you can see U.S. capitalists’ aim with gentrification is to follow the European model. The inner cities were once for the poor and working class, for communities of color. But now they will be only for the wealthy.”
Her views were echoed recently in a New York Times op-ed piece by Michael Henry Adams, another devout advocate for saving Harlem from the menace of gentrification. He disparages people who “treat the neighborhood like a blank slate,” proclaiming they “don’t see color” as an important vector in the shifting demographics of Harlem. “They have no idea how insulting they are being, denying us our heritage and our stake in Harlem’s future,” Adams asserted.
Beyond the passionate rhetoric about preserving Harlem’s heritage and legacy are actual projects to this end, such as While We Are Still Here, led by Karen Taylor. “Our purpose in preserving Harlem’s history begins with exploring the history of two landmark buildings—555 and 409 Edgecombe Avenue,” she said. “A veritable who’s who in Black America lived in these two locations, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul and Eslanda Robeson, Elizabeth Catlett, to mention but a few. After we document their stays and others in the buildings we will extend our research into the larger tableau of the community’s history.”
In several respects Harlem is beginning to resemble its past when the majority of the population was White. Not until the Black real estate speculators such as Philip Payton and "Pig Foot Mary" (Lillian Harris Dean) began to slice and dice the community was there rental space available for African Americans, albeit at an exorbitant price.
That exorbitant price is becoming more and more a reality in the housing industry with only a dollop of affordable housing. And, we ask, affordable for whom?
Mr. Adams raises another point about the erasure of Harlem’s heritage. If Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the soon-to-be-former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is right, we have nothing to fear about that possibility. In a recent interview he said that as long as politically and socially conscious Black Americans control the essential institutions in Harlem—the Schomburg, the Studio Museum, the National Black Theater, the Apollo Theater, the Dance Theater of Harlem, the Amsterdam News, and the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce--“our heritage and culture is secure and in good hands.”
Whither goes Harlem, the poet Langston Hughes observed many years ago, so goes Black America. Well, like the verdict on charter schools across the country, the jury is still out on the G word.
Herb Boyd is an author, journalist, and activist who teaches at the City College of New York. His forthcoming book is Black Detroit--A People's Struggle for Self-Determination (Amistad, 2017). Follow him on Twitter @Simbabinski1.
Marvin X thinking out loud on the OPD, Slavery, Global wars and the beauty of life in spite of ugliness
Marvin X and Nuyorican poet Nancy Mercado at the reception for him in Harlem, NY at the home of author Rashidah Ismaili.
Brothers ask Marvin X, "Marvin, how come every time I see you, you with a fine lady? How you do dat?" Answer: You have to be nice, just be nice. You have to be a friend to have a friend, I heard. My three daughters have humbled me to the extreme as per my need to recover from the addiction to the patriarchal mythology and its Macho culture that treats women as things. People have noticed how my aura changes when talking with my daughters.
In my patriarchal mentality, I thought my sons would fulfill my dreams
but alas, my daughters have taken the baton and continue every aspect of our family tradition as conscious people.
In my healing pamphlet Mythology of Pussy and Dick, the leit motif is a quote from poet Kujichagulia, "If you think I'm just a physical thing, wait til you see the spiritual power I bring."
It has taken me a lifetime to learn how to be nice, especially to the women who love me and I claim to love. You know my favorite song is Nature Boy, i.e., "The greatest thing you will ever learn is to love and be loved in return...."
So what is the endgame? The more things change, the more they stay the same! Alas, we thought slavery ended but there is more slavery now than in 1863. There are 3 million slaves in America under the US constitution or the New Jim Crow.
We thought the holocaust ended with Sir John Hawkins, King James, Hitler or was it Stalin, King Leopold or Pol Pot or Rwanda or Syria or America! How many did the US kill in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan in its permanent wars?
Will our children ever know peace? I was born into war, 1944, and have known nothing but war ever since, atomic bomb on Japan, Palestine, Korea, Vietnam and now Africa and the Middle East. Who benefits from these wars, who suffers? And will it end with a bang or whimper as the poet asked?
--Marvin X
6/28/16
Catch Marvin X Sunday, July 3, 1:30PM at the San Francisco Main Library, Civic Center. He will be part of the discussion on Black Hollywood unChained, edited by Ishmael Reed, Third World Press, Chicago.
Don't miss the discussion by Black Hollywood unChained contributors at the SF Main Library, July3, 1:30PM
Some of you know that last year, Third World Press published Black Hollywood Unchained. Edited
by Ishmael Reed, the book contains a collection of critical essays by
various authors around the country in reaction to Quentin Tarentino’s
movie Django Unchained.
On
Sunday, July 3, 1:30-3:30 pm, several of the authors will participate
in a panel discussion at the San Francisco Public Library Main Branch to
discuss the impact of Django Unchained as
well as other Hollywood movie depictions of African-American life.
Included with author presentations will be a time for questions and
answers.
Along with Ishmael Reed, other participants include Halifu Osumare, Cecil Brown, Marvin X, Justin Desmangles, and myself.
If you’re in the Bay Area that weekend, hope you can make it.
Jesse Allen-Taylor
Monday, June 27, 2016
Toronto Star: Acclaimed Toronto author Austin Clarke dead at 81
Acclaimed Toronto author Austin Clarke dead at 81
Winner of the Giller Prize for The Polished Hoe, the Barbados-born writer became a member of the Order of Canada in 1998.
Austin Clarke, the acclaimed Toronto-based novelist of books such as the 2002 Giller Prize-winning The Polished Hoe, died early Sunday morning after a long illness. He was 81.
Clarke’s
passing was confirmed by Patrick Crean, his long-time friend and former
publisher. He is survived by four daughters, a son and his former wife,
Betty.
Clarke, who was born in Barbados,
moved to Toronto in 1955 to study at the University of Toronto. A
handful of brief digressions aside, he never left, evolving here into a
frank and forthright literary voice and a champion of black rights.
But
he was leery of taking Canadian citizenship, acquiring it only in 1981,
explaining later that “I was not keen on becoming a citizen of a
society that regarded me as less than a human being.”
Indeed,
Clarke’s observations of the splintering of Canadian society in the
’50s and ’60s gave voice to a new version of a country in its earliest
stages of becoming.
“Austin
wrote our multicultural moment before we even had a language to
describe it,” said Rinaldo Walcott, a professor at the University of
Toronto and a longtime friend. “He was an astute observer of those
social dynamics, and he was a critic of it as well.”
Clarke
was bluntly critical of the endemic racism he encountered both here and
at home, in Barbados, a colonial British outpost where he attended
Anglican schools before coming to Canada. ‘Membering, his lyrical memoir published last year, recalls with vivid detail his daily struggles with discrimination in an uptight city of not-so-long ago.
In
it, he writes of living “in the atmosphere of great physical fear, of
the expectation that a policeman might shoot me — bang-bang, you’re
dead, dead — of being refused the renting of a basement room, or an
apartment in a public building, that I would find myself standing
noticeably longer than other customers at a counter in Eaton’s store, at
the corner of Yonge and College Sts., that I might be thrown out,
sometimes physically, from a restaurant, or a nightclub, as Oscar
Peterson was, and face the embarrassment of being told by a barber that
he does not cut niggers’ hair. This is my Toronto.”
Yet
in private, friends speak of a generous, passionate spirit filled with
an affection for simple pleasures in life: A love of cooking, of
conversation, and of music. But he was also a complicated man, whose
fiery passions around issues of inequity seemed at times to chafe with
his conservative Anglican beliefs.
“If you
were going to have a real relationship with Austin, you had to be
prepared to move nimbly,” said the author Barry Callaghan, a
decades-long friend and literary colleague who in 1996 published The Austin Clarke Reader
through his imprint, Exile Editions. “He was a worldly fellow, a man of
elegance, a man of conservative principles, but at the same time, he
could be engaged with people that most conservatives wouldn’t let into
their house.”
Clarke, famously, made a
failed run as a Progressive Conservative candidate for the Ontario
legislature in 1977, though his literary and intellectual fascinations
seemed a clear ideological contradiction. He had built his reputation as
a novelist as a keen observer of the nuanced plight of immigrants in
Toronto, and specifically women. Meanwhile, his advocacy for a racially
tolerant society had led him to places far outside standard conservative
boundaries.
In 1963, while working as a
journalist at the CBC, Clarke found himself in Harlem, N.Y., seeking an
interview with the great African American writer James Baldwin, but
instead came back with an hour of tape from a chance encounter with
Malcolm X. Quickly building a reputation as a voice of black empowerment
in Canada, Clarke wrote at a furious pace, though his passion would
drive him away, at least for a time.
In 1968, Maclean’s
magazine published a piece Clarke had written about his encounters with
racism here under the headline “Canada’s Angriest Black Man.”
Disillusioned at the simplification of what he had written as a complex
issue, Clarke moved on to Yale University, where he became one of a
group of professors to establish the school’s Black Studies program, one
of the first in the United States.
Clarke’s
enthusiasms were diffuse, straddling culture and politics. From Yale,
they would lead him to Washington, D.C., where he served as a cultural
attaché for the Barbadian embassy in 1973, and back home to Barbados,
where from 1975 to 1977, he ran the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation.
He
eventually circled back home to Toronto, and Walcott believes his
return helped seed the rich literary fabric that the city, and the
country, enjoys today. “His great passions were for food, for drink, but
much more than that, for young writers across race and class and
gender, whom he would have to his home and mentor selflessly, reading
manuscripts and offering his feedback,” Walcott said.
Though
his passion for social justice never wavered — he served on the
Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada from 1988 to 1993 — his
commitment to his writing could be a powerful, monastic counterbalance.
In the late ’90s, Walcott lived downstairs from Clarke while he wrote The Polished Hoe,
in a central Toronto duplex. “I wouldn’t hear a sound for three days,”
Walcott recalls, “so I’d call and see if he was all right. He would tell
me he was writing — he hadn’t eaten, or slept. It would possess him
like a spirit.”
Clarke’s literary
accomplishments, coupled with his strong social conscience, won him the
Order of Canada in 1998, a poignant honour given the critical voice he
had so often taken regarding his adopted homeland.
All the accolades aside, what Callaghan recalls most is a complicated friend who changed all around him for the better.
“When
I think of special dinners here, it was also Austin that said grace,”
he said. “There was no one like him, because there could be no one like
him. There were just too many cross-references in his personality. He
was singular.”
A funeral will be held at St. James Cathedral on July 9.
The saga continues: Oakland Police Department and the Mythology of Pussy and Dick
Poet/philosopher Marvin X at his Academy of da Corner, 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland
Don't say Marvin X didn't try to help the OPD with his 18-page pamphlet The Mythology of Pussy and Dick. When the OPD ran down on him at his Academy of da Corner, 14th and Broadway (Ishmael Reed says he's Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland) three cars deep, they claimed someone reported he was passing out pornography. When he asked the officer did he want to read it, the officer said no and they departed.
For sure, thousands and thousands of Oakland youth and adults have read it and people come back two and three times for another copy because their friends steal the pamphlet or simply refuse to return it. According to poet Paradise Jah Love, "They fight over that pamphlet as if it's Black gold!" A 16 year old told Marvin X, "Yes, I read it with my mother. We agreed with part of what you said, other parts we didn't agree, but I wish I'd read it when I was 8 years old!" A senior citizen told Marvin, "Boy, I hate to admit it, but I learned something!"
As per the OPD and prostitutes, Marvin has a passage in which he discusses his love for a prostitute. (The full story of his love is described in his essay The Maid, the Ho, the Cook, from his collection of essays In the Crazy House Called America, Black Bird Press, 2002.) The prostitute told Marvin he was the most macho man she'd ever met, but his pamphlet shows his attempt to recover from the Macho culture as his friend, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, described OPD culture.
Marvin X and Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf
Don't say Marvin X didn't try to help you in your male/female relations. Don't say he
didn't try to stop you from beating each other to death because you think you own
each other as you have been programmed to think. Don't say he didn't tell you to stop
the physical, verbal and emotional abuse. Don't say he didn't tell you to love each otherunconditionally, ignoring foibles and defects of character, ideological backwardness and
other shortcomings that make you not want to love the one you're with. For the most
part, it's cheaper to keep her/him, for most of the time when we go to another person,
they are the same as the one we departed from, the only difference is their name.
--Marvin X
6/27/16
Sex, Suicide and Failure to Report at the OPD
Sat June 25, 2016
Oakland, California (CNN)Four police chiefs in 10 days. 28 police officers with allegations involving a prostitute. Five police departments ensnared in controversy. Two suicides. And one teenage girl.
This is the volatile mix that has led to a sexual misconduct scandal of epic proportions in and around Oakland, California.
If that weren't enough, it all happened while the Oakland Police Department was already under the watch of a federal monitor and compliance director.
And the scandal all began to unravel because of the words of a dead man.
An officer's suicide, a secret revealed
Brendan O'Brien was an officer with the Oakland Police Department.
Oakland police officers showed up at the home of one of their own on September 25, 2015. Officer Brendan O'Brien's mother called them. She came to check on her son at his Oakland apartment and arrived to a gruesome scene.
Her son was stretched out on the couch, his mouth open, his body too still to be alive, according to the coroner's report. Investigators found him with gun still "on his right hand", and a bullet through his mouth. The inside of his right arm emblazoned with a tattoo saying "Live Together Die Alone," according to the coroner's report.
There were several signs of suicide. According to a source with knowledge of the investigation, the most telling: a suicide note. In it, O'Brien spilled details of a life he thought wasn't worth living, and an affair with a teenager.
"A couple days after he was found, I got questioned by homicide," an 18-year-old who calls herself Celeste Guap told CNN.
Guap says she is the teenager O'Brien had been "dating." And she think she knows why he finally took his life.
"He was really depressed and our relationship wasn't a secret anymore and he would've lost his job," Guap said.
And and our relationship wasn't a secret anymore and he would've lost his job," Guap said. .
Oakland mayor to OPD: This is 'not a frat house'
How she met Officer Brendan O'Brien in the first place is disturbing in and of it itself. Guap says she was working the streets as a prostitute. She says she was underage at the time, which would legally make her a victim of child sex trafficking. A pimp was chasing her down a street one day in Oakland when she saw O'Brien.
"He saved me when I was 17," Guap tells CNN in a phone conversation. "Instead of taking me to jail, we just kind of started something there, you know."
Guap says she, underage at the time, and the officer began a sexual relationship.
The accusations are serious, scandalous, and if proven true, also criminal. Guap says she lied to investigators at first because she "didn't want any drama," but then they found proof in her phone.
Instead of taking me to jail, we just kind of started something there.
Investigators learned she not only had a sexual relationship with O'Brien, but other officers too. Guap says some of the officers even paid her for sex. And some paid her with information, tipping her off about prostitution stings so she could avoid them.
Guap tells CNN there were 28 officers total: Fourteen Oakland police officers, five Richmond police officers, several Alameda County Sherriff's deputies, a Livermore police officer and a Contra Costa County Sheriff's deputy.
Guap says she never met, but also texted sexually explicit messages to a former Oakland officer who became an inspector in the Alameda County District Attorney's office. That is the very office that will decide whether anyone should be prosecuted related to these allegations. Guap says the officers trusted her in part because her mother and stepfather are both police dispatchers.
No one has been charged with any crime at this point. All of the cases are under investigation.
CNN attempted multiple times to obtain comment from the Oakland Police Department, but they did not make anyone available for an interview.
Another death alerts the feds to the case
Oakland police responded to O'Brien's home after he called 911 about his wife.
Long before Officer O'Brien took his life, he was battling rumors about another woman in his life, his wife.
A year and three months before O'Brien's suicide, Oakland police were at his apartment investigating another death. It was June 16, 2014.
Officer Brendan O'Brien had called 911. Detectives arrived to find his wife Irma Huerta Lopez dead from a gunshot wound to the right side of her head, according to the coroner's report.
A government official showed CNN pictures of the crime scene. It appeared Lopez had been sitting on the edge of the bed when she shot herself. Both of her feet were planted on the carpeted floor. A gun was lying near her foot on the carpet, along with a shell casing. A second casing was also found on the floor.
O'Brien told investigators he was arguing with his wife that night, according to the coroner's report. He left to go pick up cigarettes at a nearby store. Fifteen minutes later he told them he returned to find his wife unresponsive. It was a few minutes before 10 p.m.
Irma Huerta Lopez was pronounced dead at 10:12 p.m. The autopsy report says the gun used belonged to her husband. It was O'Brien's "off-duty firearm a Glock 45 caliber." The death was initially deemed suspicious. The coroner's investigative report said, "a press hold will be placed on the case because of the potential criminal investigation."
Our whole family does not believe she took her own life.
Then the rumors started. The whispers turned into accusations by Lopez's family that Oakland Officer O'Brien had killed his wife. To this day Lopez's family members still believe so.
"Our whole family does not believe she took her own life," a family member told CNN. But Oakland police and the Alameda County Sheriff's Office Coroner's bureau both concluded otherwise. The coroner declared Lopez's official cause of death a suicide. But the whispers around town persisted. Then O'Brien, who had a "history of depression and post traumatic stress disorder," according to the coroner's investigative report, committed suicide.
A source familiar with both death investigations says when that happened, an indivdual pushed the federal monitor and compliance director to examine O'Brien's wife's death to ensure there was no cover up.
Compliance director Robert Warshaw began examining the death. It remained classified a suicide, but the investigation revealed something else, a source told CNN.
Warshaw did not return CNN calls for comment on this case. Court documents show the monitor did take action.
Warshaw alerted U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson to "irregularities and potential violations" of an old "Negotiation Settlement Agreement" Oakland police were supposed to be following due to a separate case involving the department.
That agreement required the department to alert the monitor in a matter of days if there was an internal investigation going on.
But nobody notified the monitor about the sexual misconduct allegations involving Guap though they were investigating the case for six months, Oakland civil rights attorney Jim Chanin says.
"They broke the agreement," Chanin says.
Judge Henderson ordered the federal monitor take over the latest internal investigation involving police officers on March 23, 2016, taking it out of the hands of Oakland Police Department's Internal Affairs.
"Almost immediately, with the monitor compliance director in charge of the investigation, officers started getting walked out of the building," Chanin says. "There were suspensions and at least two resignations."
He says no action had been taken during the six months Oakland police handled the allegations themselves.
Oakland police: No strangers to scandal
Oakland Chief of Police Sean Whent resigned.
Since 2003 a federal monitor has been in place to make sure the Oakland Police Department complied with a negotiated settlement agreement stemming from a police corruption scandal.
Officers had been accused of planting evidence and beating up suspects. No accused officers were ever convicted but one officer fled prosecution and to this day is still on the run. The city paid out more than $10 million to more than 100 plaintiffs and agreed to make reforms, eventually ending up under federal monitoring.
They were almost to the finish line after 13 long years. Attorney Chanin along with attorney John Burris agreed to work with Oakland police to make sure they were complying with the settlement agreement.
Chanin says the department had been doing so well under the leadership of then Chief Sean Whent, that those involved with the monitoring, including Chanin, were about to recommend the department could run itself without federal oversight.
They fumbled at the one yard line. They were doing so, so well.
Then the sex scandal broke. Chief Whent, who had come from the department's Internal Affairs division, suddenly resigned.
The fallout at the Oakland Police Department had just begun.
"They fumbled at the one yard line," Chanin says, expressing shock and utter disgust with the latest accusations. "They were doing so, so well. This is a great disservice to the many good officer's working hard every day in that department."
Guap says she never meant to bring the department down. She points out she never went to police. The police came to her asking questions after O'Brien's death.
"I feel guilty, but at the same time they knew they were doing something wrong too, so I can't take the full blame," Guap says.
What happens next?
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf has slammed the Oakland police culture.
If allegations against the officers are proven true, they could lead to charges of statutory rape, solicitation of prostitution, and potentially sex trafficking, legal experts say.
CNN has reached out to the departments involved. Several Oakland police officers have been put on administrative leave and two of them have resigned in light of the sexual misconduct scandal. Contra Costa County put a deputy on administrative leave pending the investigation. Richmond police tell CNN several officers are under investigation and the investigation remains in progress. The district attorney's office has put one of their inspectors on leave pending an investigation.
Investigations are underway in other departments. The Alameda County Sheriff's department says they have cleared those named by Guap of any wrongdoing or unethical behavior through an independent investigation.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf has put the City Administrator in charge of the department's administration and personnel decisions. New acting Assistant Chief David Downing will oversee day-to-day operations. The federal monitor is now involved in recruitment and hiring.
Many police officers not involved in the scandals facing the department are mortified and disgusted by allegations against their coworkers.
A longtime Oakland police officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity says if the officers are found to be guilty, "they should be put underneath the jail."
CNN's Nick Valencia contributed to this report.
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