Marvin X and Muslim American Literature

Teaching Diaspora Literature: Muslim American Literature as an Emerging Field
by Dr. Mohja Kahf

Is there such a thing as Muslim American literature (MAL)? I argue that there is: It begins with the Muslims of the Black Arts Movement (1965-75). The Autobiography of Malcolm X is one of its iconic texts; it includes American Sufi writing, secular ethnic novels, writing by immigrant and second-generation Muslims, and religious American Muslim literature. Many of the works I would put into this category can and do also get read in other categories, such as African
American, Arab American, and South Asian literature, "Third World" women's writing, diasporic Muslim literature in English, and so forth. While the place of these works in other categories cannot be denied, something is gained in reading them together as part of an American Muslim cultural landscape. Like Jewish American literature by the 1930s, Muslim American literature is in a formative stage. It will be interesting to see how it develops (and who will be its Philip Roth!)

I suggest the following typology of MAL only as a foothold, a means of bringing a tentative order to the many texts, one that should be challenged, and maybe ultimately dropped altogether. My first grouping, the "Prophets of Dissent," suggests that Muslim works in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) are the first set of writings in American literature to voice a cultural position identifiable as Muslim. Contemporary Muslim writing that takes the achievements of the BAM as an important literary influence also belongs here, and is characterized similarly by its "outsider" status, moral critique of mainstream American values, and often prophetic, visionary tone. In contrast, the writers of what I call "the Multi-Ethnic Multitudes" tend to enjoy "insider" status in American letters, often entering through MFA programs and the literary establishment, getting
published through trade and university book industries, garnering reviews in the mainstream press. They do not share an overall aesthetic but are individual writers of various ethnicities and a wide range of secularisms and spiritualities, and indeed I question my placing them all in one group, and do so temporarily only for the sake of convenience.

On the other hand, my third group, the "New American Transcendentalists," appears to cohere, in aesthetic terms, as writers who share a broad Sufi cultural foundation undergirding their literary work. Their writings often show familiarity with the Sufi poets of several classical Muslim literatures (e.g., in Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Urdu), as well as with American Transcendentalists of the nineteenth century, and that which tends toward the spiritual and the ecstatic in modern
American poetry. Finally, the "New Pilgrims" is my term for a loose grouping of writers for whom Islam is not merely a mode of dissent, cultural background, or spiritual foundation for their writing, but its aim and explicit topic. Of the four groups, the New Pilgrims are the ones who write in an overtly religious mode and motivation, like Ann Bradstreet, Cotton Mather, and the Puritans of early American history. This does not prevent them from being capable of producing
great literature, any more than it prevented the great Puritan writers. Here is an example of just a few writers in each category, by no means a comprehensive list:
Prophets of Dissent
From the Black Arts Movement:
• Marvin X, whose Fly to Allah (1969) is possibly the first book of poems published in English by a Muslim American author.
• Sonia Sanchez, whose A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1974) is the work of her Muslim period.
• Amiri Baraka, whose A Black Mass (2002) renders the Nation of Islam's Yacoub genesis theology into drama. As with Sanchez, the author was Muslim only briefly but the influence of the Islamic period stretches over a significant part of his overall production.
Later Prophets of Dissent include:
• Calligraphy of Thought, the Bay area poetry venue for young "Generation M" Muslim American spoken word artists who today continue in the visionary and dissenting mode of the BAM.
• Suheir Hammad, Palestinian New Yorker, diva of Def Poetry Jam (on Broadway and HBO), whose tribute to June Jordan in her first book of poetry, Born Palestinian, Born Black (1996), establishes her line of descent from the BAM, at least as one (major) influence on her work.
• El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) is an iconic figure for this mode of Muslim American writing and, indeed, for many writers in all four categories.

Multi-Ethnic Multitudes
• Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali, an influential figure in the mainstream American poetry scene, with a literary prize named after him at the University of Utah, brought the ghazal into fashion in English so that it is now taught among other forms in MFA programs.
• Naomi Shihab Nye, Palestinian American, likewise a "crossover" poet whose work enjoys
prominence in American letters, takes on Muslim content in a significant amount of her
work.
• Sam Hamod, an Arab midwesterner who was publishing poetry in journals at the same time as Marvin X.
• Nahid Rachlin's fiction has been published since well before the recent wave of literature by
others who, like her, are Iranian immigrants.
• Mustafa Mutabaruka, an African American Muslim, debut novel Seed (2002).
• Samina Ali, midwesterner of Indian parentage, debut novel Madras on Rainy Days (2004),
was featured on the June 2004 cover of Poets & Writers.
• Khaled Hosseini, debut novel The Kite Runner (2003).
• Michael Muhammad Knight, a Muslim of New York Irish Catholic background, whose punk rock novel The Taqwacores (2004) delves deeply into Muslim identity issues.
• There are a number of journals where Muslim American literature of various ethnicities can
be found today, among them Chowrangi, a Pakistani American magazine out of New
Jersey, and Mizna, an Arab American poetry magazine out of Minneapolis.

New American Transcendentalists

• Daniel (Abd al-Hayy) Moore is an excellent example of this mode of Muslim American writing. California-born, he published as a Beat poet in the early sixties, became a Sufi Muslim, renounced poetry for a decade, then renounced his renouncement and began publishing again, prolifically and with a rare talent. His Ramadan Sonnets (City Lights, 1986) is a marriage of content and form that exemplifies the "Muslim/American" simultaneity of Muslim American art.
• The Rumi phenomenon: apparently the most read poet in America is a Muslim. He merits mention for that, although technically I am not including literature in translation. Then again, why not? As with so many other of my limits, this is arbitrary and only awaits someone to make a case against it.
• Journals publishing poetry in this mode include The American Muslim, Sufi, Qalbi, and others.

New American Pilgrims

• Pamela Taylor writes Muslim American science fiction. Iman Yusuf writes "Islamic
romance." This group of writers is not limited to genre writers, however.
Dasham Brookins writes and performs poetry and maintains a website, MuslimPoet.com, where poets such as Samantha Sanchez post. Umm Zakiyya (pseud.) has written a novel, If I Should Speak (2001), about a young Muslim American and her roommates in college. Writers in this group also come from many ethnicities but, unlike those in my second category, come together around a more or less coherent, more or less conservative Muslim identity.

Websites tend to ban erotica and blasphemy, for example. The Islamic Writers Alliance, a group formed by Muslim American women, has just put out its first anthology. Major published authors have yet to emerge in this grouping, but there is no reason to think they will not eventually do so. My criteria for Muslim American literature are a flexible combination of three factors: Muslim authorship. Including this factor, however vague or tenuous, prevents widening the scope to the point of meaninglessness, rather than simply including any work about Muslims by an author with no biographical connection to the slightest sliver of Muslim identity (such as Robert Ferrigno with his recent dystopian novel about a fanatical Muslim takeover of America). It is a cultural, not religious, notion of Muslim that is relevant. A "lapsed Muslim" author, as one poet on my roster called himself, is still a Muslim author for my purposes. I am not interested in levels of commitment or practice, but in literary Muslimness.

Language and aesthetic of the writing.

In a few cases, there is a deliberate espousal of an aesthetic that has Islamic roots, such as the Afrocentric Islamic aesthetic of the Muslim authors
in the Black Arts Movement.

Relevance of themes or content.

If the Muslim identity of the author is vague or not explicitly professed, which is often the case with authors in the "Multi-Ethnic Multitudes," but the content itself is relevant to Muslim American experience, I take that as a signal that the text is choosing to enter the conversation of Muslim American literature and ought to be included.In defining boundaries for research that could become impossibly diffuse, I choose to look mainly at fiction and poetry, with autobiography and memoir writings selectively included. I have not included writings in languages other than English, although there are Muslims in America who write in Arabic, Urdu, and other languages. I have looked at the twentieth century onward,
and there is archival digging to be done in earlier periods: the Spanish colonial era may yield Muslim writing, and we already know that some enslaved Muslims in the nineteenth century have left narratives. More research is needed. If one expands the field from "literature" to "Muslim American culture," one can also include Motown, rap, and hip-hop lyrics by Muslim artists, screenplays such as the Muslim American classic The Message by the late Syrian American producer Mustapha Aqqad, books written for children, sermons, essays, and other genres.There are pleasures and patterns that emerge from reading this profusion of disparate texts under the rubric of Muslim American cultural narrative. It is time! I hope, as this field emerges, that others will do work in areas I have left aside in this brief initial exploration.


Love And War
poems
by Marvin X
preface byLorenzo Thomas
1995

Review
by Mohja Kahf

Have spent the last few days (when not mourning with friends and family the passing of my family friend and mentor in Muslim feminism and Islamic work, Sharifa AlKhateeb, (may she dwell in Rahma), immersed in the work of Marvin X and amazed at his brilliance.

This poet has been prolific since his first book of poems, Fly to Allah, (1969), right up to his most recent Love and War Poems (1995) and Land of My Daughters, 2005, not to mention his plays, which were produced (without royalties) in Black community theatres from the 1960s to the present, and essay collections such as In the Crazy House Called America, 2002, and Wish I Could Tell You The Truth, 2005.

Marvin X was a prime shaper of the Black Arts Movement (1964-1970s) which is, among other things, the birthplace of modern Muslim American literature, and it begins with him.

Well, Malik Shabazz and him. But while the Autobiography of Malcolm X is a touchstone of Muslim American culture, Marvin X and other Muslims in BAM were the emergence of a cultural expression of Black Power and Muslim thought inspired by Malcolm, who was, of course, ignited by the teachings and writings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

And that, taken all together, is what I see as the starting point of Muslim American literature. Then there are others, immigrant Muslims and white American Muslims and so forth, that follow.There are also antecedents, such as the letters of Africans enslaved in America. Maybe there is writing by Muslims in the Spanish and Portuguese era or earlier, but that requires archival research of a sort I am not going to be able to do.

My interest is contemporary literature, and by literature I am more interested in poetry and fiction than memoir and non-fiction, although that is a flexible thing.I argue that it is time to call Muslim American literature a field, even though many of these writings can be and have been classified in other ways-studied under African American literature or to take the writings of immigrant Muslims, studied under South Asian ethnic literature or Arab American literature.

With respect to Marvin X, I wonder why I am just now hearing about him-I read Malcolm when I was 12, I read Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez and others from the BAM in college and graduate school-why is attention not given to his work in the same places I encountered these other authors?

Declaring Muslim American literature as a field of study is valuable because recontextualizing it will add another layer of attention to his incredibly rich body of work.He deserves to be WAY better known than he is among Muslim Americans and generally, in the world of writing and the world at large.

By we who are younger Muslim American poets, in particular, Marvin should be honored as our elder, one who is still kickin, still true to the word!

Love and War Poems is wrenching and powerful, combining a powerful critique of America ("America downsizes like a cripple whore/won't retire/too greedy to sleep/too fat to rest") but also a critique of deadbeat dads and drug addicts (not sparing himself) and men who hate.

"For the Men" is so Quranic poem it gave me chills with verses such as:
for the men who honor wives
and the men who abuse them
for the men who win
and the men who sin
for the men who love God
and the men who hate
for the men who are brothers
and the men who are beasts
"O Men, listen to the wise," the poet pleads:
there is no escapefor the men of this world
or the men of the next

He is sexist as all get out, in the way that is common for men of his generation and his radicalism, but he is refreshingly aware of that and working on it. It's just that the work isn't done and if that offends you to see a man in process and still using the 'b' word, look out. Speaking of the easily offended, he warns in his introduction that "life is often profane and obscene, such as the present condition of African American people."

If you want pure and holy, he says, read the Quran and the Bible, because Marvin is talking about "the low down dirty truth." For all that, the poetry of Marvin X is like prayer, beauty-full of reverence and honor for Truth. "It is. it is. it is."

A poem to his daughter Muhammida is a sweet mix of parental love and pride and fatherly freak-out at her sexuality and independence, ending humbly with:

peace Mu
it's on you
yo world
sister-girl

Other people don't get off so easy, including a certain "black joint chief of staff ass nigguh (kill 200,000 Muslims in Iraq)" in the sharply aimed poem "Free Me from My Freedom." (Mmm hmm, the 'n' word is all over the place in Marvin too.)

Nature poem, wedding poem, depression poem, wake-up call poems, it's all here. Haiti, Rwanda, the Million Man March, Betsy Ross's maid, OJ, Rabin, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and other topics make it into this prophetically voiced collection of dissent poetry, so Islamic and so African American in its language and its themes, a book that will stand in its beauty long after the people mentioned in it pass. READ MARVIN X for RAMADAN!--

Mohja Kahf Associate Professor / Dept. of English, Middle East & Islamic Studies, University of Arkansas-Fayetteville

Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_Marvin_X_the_Father_of_Muslim_American_Literature#ixzz1Tyw34nV1

Somethin' Proper, the Autobiography of Marvin X, from the introduction by Dr. Nathan Hare

Marvin X
photo Kamau Amen Ra





Somethin' Proper, the Autobiography of Marvin X, Black Bird Press, 1998

from the Introduction by Dr. Nathan Hare, the Black Think Tank

In SOMETHIN' PROPER, we quickly see that we are inside the pages not only of Marvin's private political papers, comprising a lyrical diary shaped to be read and enjoyed like a novel by the masterful hands of an internationally noted black poet, but we are being escorted to the cutting edge of a fascinating postmodern black literary genre in the making, the notes of an undying black warrior who refuses to give up, give out or give in!

Although easy to read by almost anybody wishing to do so, SOMETHIN' PROPER (apparently a phrase from the drug subculture, i.e., BREAK ME OFF SOMETHIN' PROPER), presents us at once with an opportunity for a deeper understanding of a panorama of participants in the often poignant but sometimes hilarious inner workings of the black male psyche, from the middle class bourgeois pretenders such as "tenured Negroes" on the academic plantation and their "negrocity," to "coconuts" in the corporations, and across the spectrum to brothers in the hood, particularly the way in which utility and haughty demeanor conceal and mask the panoramic and pervasive depression of the black male.

Before his death at the early age of 36, Frantz Fanon, the black psychiatrist who lived and wrote about the relations between the oppressor and oppressed in the battle of Algiers (Wretched of the Earth; Black Skin, White Masks, and A Dying Colonialism), presented us with clear psychiatric paradigms for the struggles Marvin deftly captures for us.

Marvin is able to give us insights into himself and his affiliates (Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Little Bobby Hutton, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Angela Davis, et.al., that are original but reminiscent of Fanon, because Marvin is bearing the covers on his life and the life of others.

Of all the many disorders and distortions that plague the black male, each and every day, perhaps the ones that take the heaviest tool on his ravished brain are those that—if not contained by armed resistance—revolve around the painful difficulty of gaining control over his individual and collective destiny, around what is known in mental health circles as "the locus of control," the dilemma of resistance to the enemy from without and the enemy from within (including the self, if we consider that there can be no master without those who, for whatever reason, are willing to be a slave). Might makes right but not for long.

If we honor the likes of Patrick Henry for saying "give me liberty or give me death," it is no matter that when the Negro says give him liberty or death the white man tries to give him death! The so-called Negro is confronted with a choice Patrick Henry had not reckoned with, something Fanon called "reactional disorders" or "psychosomatic pathology" that is the direct product of oppression.

But out of a last ditch desperation in self-medication and the management of his pulverized and thwarted emotions, in a mindless effort to soothe his psychological and social wounds, the black male is introduced unwarily if discreetly to the vicious cycle of self-mutilation and induced addiction, which takes hold and spreads like an epidemic virus as part of the psycho-technology, historically, of the white man's oppression of the North American African and others around the world.

In his powerlessness and victimization, with nothing left to lean on, the black man is likely to mount the seesaw, if not the roller coaster of racial psycho-social dependency and messianic religiosity (becoming the mad-dog religious fanatic, believing in a savior other than himself) on the one hand and the individual chemical dependent on the other, i.e. the dope fiend.

Marvin decontructs both. In the bottomless caverns of addiction in any form, there seems no amount of religiosity, coke, crack, alcohol or sex sufficient to sedate the social angst and shattered cultural strivings.

The more the black man tempts to medicate his anxiety and to mask his depression and self doubts with pretense and hostility, the more he finds himself in trouble with the persons he must love and be loved by than with the alien representatives of the society that would control and castrate his manhood.

Novelist Richard Wright, addressing these paradoxes and dilemmas in his own autobiography BLACK BOY, explained that, "Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning."

The catch is in the way these things turn out after the boy has been taken through the meat grinder of growing up within the machinery of white social control. In response, the strategy or road most taken by both Marvin X and Richard Wright, to put it simply, is FLIGHT (what Wright as a matter of fact names the middle passage of his novel, Native Son, book 2 of 3).

As surely as the individual who accepts oppression is constantly in flight from his racial identity, the black man who rejects it is constantly on the run from the agency of white supremacy that must control him and wishes to annihilate him outright. And here is where Marvin's story is most valuable to us , helping us to grasp the meaning of the tradition of escape within our race, literature and history, stretching back to the slave trade and slave ships of the middle passage, down to the demanding requirements of escape from coercion, incarceration and surveillance in the modern era: he takes us through a childhood of continual efforts to avoid juvenile hall, to the flights of his father (despite punishing ambiguities, Marvin X dedicates his book to both his parents in memorial), calling upon pure personal honesty and the deepest levels of understanding to appreciate the parental struggles of his own and the resulting psycho-sexual and social conflicts.

Without professing to do so, Marvin X speaks here most effectively of all black men, exposing their triumphs and follies, telling all he knows about everybody, including himself, always seeming to exact the hardest toll of all on himself, inviting us openly and unashamedly into the intricacies of his youthful endeavors to love too many women, including more than one try at the practice of polygamy (at one point he had four wives, in the Islamic tradition), until he realizes that if monogamy is the love and marriage of one woman, polygamy is the love or marriage of one woman too many!

I predict that SOMETHIN' PROPER (the life and times of a North American African Poet) will readily emerge as an underground classic as well as a classic of the black consciousness movement and the world of the troubled inner city, a manual of value to any brother who has lost his way and the sister who would help him to understand or know how to find it, to find it within himself, in the intriguing story of Marvin X, who has been there and the women and political fellow-travelers in the black movement who were there with him in his often daring escapades, his secret flights and open confrontations with white supremacy.

In the end, is he bitter? Or is he happy as a negro eating watermelon on massa's plantation? Well, in the beginning white people are devils—but by the end, all people are devils—in Marvin's world. After all, this is his story. Nevertheless, by the end we are convinced Marvin has regained faith in himself, his God and his people.

And it is gratifying in an era of the sellout, the faint hearted and the fallen, to see that 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.

I'm glad I stopped that day on Market Street and bought a pair of Marvin's sunglasses, but I wish I knew where to find those sunglasses now, because I could feel so proud to wear them, or, better yet, I could lend them to some other brother who was trying to find his way to SOMETHIN' PROPER while moving in the direction of the sun.
--Dr. Nathan Hare

Millions March in Harlem, Saturday, August 13, 2011

by Amadi Ajamu

The Millions March in Harlem buzz is in the streets around the country. Posters and flyers are everywhere and people are excitedly talking about the need for unified action and change. The Millions March in Harlem will be held on Saturday, August 13, assembling on Malcolm X Blvd at 110th Street at 10 AM. It will focus on the attack on African people on the Continent and in the United States.

The heinous bombing of Libya by the US and NATO, illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe by the West, and the Bloomberg administration’s destruction of housing, jobs, education, health care and police abuse, are all a systematic assault on African communities.

Special guest speakers include: Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam; Father Miguel d'Escoto, former President of the UN General Assembly and former Foreign Minister of Nicaragua; Dr. Molefi Asante of Afrocentricity International; Viola Plummer of the December 12th Movement; NOI Minister Akbar Muhammad, and many others.

In a press conference at the United Nations Plaza Hotel on June 15, Minister Farrakhan stated, “NATO and America are trying to recolonize Africa through AFRICOM (African Command). My question to African leaders is, will you allow it? Out of fear of the so-called power of the West. Will you bow down and act against the interest of African people world wide?” Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has been a principal advocate and organizer for a United States of Africa which threatens the international power structure.

The organizers of the Millions March in Harlem held a press conference on June 22nd and Minister Akbar Muhammad reported, “Minister Farrakhan will definitely be speaking at the march on August 13. The Nation of Islam is fully behind this march, it is extremely important, and we will do all that we can to make this happen.”

Viola Plummer of the December 12th Movement International Secretariat stated, “There comes a time when people have no alternative but resistance. This march will revitalize the Pan African movement. It will broaden our peoples' world view and demonstrate the need for Africans to unite in our own political and economic interests internationally. We must expose the United Nations Security Council machinations, western imperialism, the attack on Black people in the US, and all collaborators at every turn.”

The march has garnered international attention with the participation of Father Miguel d'Escoto Brockman, who flew in from Nicaragua and attended the Harlem press conference. Father d'Escoto spoke against the “war of aggression on Libya.” Further stating “There is no people in the whole planet who know less about what the United States does abroad than Americans. They are systematically deceived. This is the very foundation of what they call democracy in this country.” Father d'Escoto went on to outline the need for reform in the United Nations, emphasizing the domination of the voting members of the UN Security Council over all other countries.

On the ground, “Millions March In Harlem” organizing teams, which are saturating the streets with bright green posters, report on the grassroots response. “We never underestimate our people's ability to analyze a situation. The vast majority of folk are clear about the attack on African people and want to do something to fight back. Mainstream media propaganda about strong African leaders like Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and President Robert Mugabe is just like what they say about Black people here who do not bow down to the status quo,” said Gregory Perry of Queens.

Bronx Coordinator Kamau Brown stated, “Colonel Gaddafi and the people of Libya have built their country from the poorest to the richest country in Africa. He is the key person in the organizing effort to build a United States of Africa. President Mugabe has dared to take back the land stolen by European settlers and give it back to the people of Zimbabwe.”

“The attack on us here is insidious. Police brutality and harassment, gentrification of our communities, housing foreclosures, destruction of public education, closing hospitals, the prison industry, the list goes on and on. They all destroy lives. The NATO bombs in Libya and the illegal sanctions in Zimbabwe kill people. Black people understand that it's time for Pan African Unity.” Brown concluded.

For more information on the upcoming Millions March in Harlem call (347) 737-3272 or Email: info@MillionsMarchHarlem.com

Message to the black man from Stan the white man or how to do for self

Fred Hampton, Jr. on JR, Minister of Mis-information

Chairman Fred Hampton, Jr. of POCC

Chairman Fred Hampton, Jr. on
JR, Former POCC Minister of Mis-information

In a conversation with this writer, Chairman Fred Hampton, Jr. of POCC, i.e. Prisoners of Conscience Committee, stated that JR defected from the organization last August, although he has yet claimed affiliation with the group, using the title POCC Minister of Information.

The Chairman stated that he bought a one way ticket from Chicago to the Bay Area to clarify his relationship with JR and to point out the many contradictions in the personal and political behavior of the former Minister of Information, i.e., Minister of Mis-information.




photo Kamau Amen Ra


Chairman Fred noted how JR helped destroy rapper Askari X by allowing him to be exploited by rap producers who produced the rapper's albums but paid him with marijuana, after pimping him all day in the studio. Askari, one of the Bay Area's greatest rappers, has long suffered with mental problems and is presently doing time in prison.

The son of slain Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, Fred Jr. recounted several occasions when the POCC organization had to put JR in check for reactionary behavior in various cities across America and abroad, including Libya when JR reportedly had Nation of Islam representative Akhbar Muhammad bumped from a panel with Malcolm Shabazz and Cynthia McKinney.

In the Chairman's mind, JR is possibly connected with the CIA and/or FBI, a connection we have suspected since we were with JR in New York and Newark on 9/11. JR has never provided us with a copy of interviews this writer conducted and JR videoed. For ten years, he as refused to provide us a copy of the interviews with people in Newark, including Amina Baraka, wife of poet Amiri Baraka, and in Philadelphia with poet Sonia Sanchez. Why is he hiding this information, if he is indeed the minister of information?

Chairman Fred says JR has pimped Malcolm Shabazz as he tried to pimp Fred. He says he and JR were never friends but simply members in the POCC organization. After the organization had to put JR in check on several occasions, he defected a year ago this August but has duped the radical community by still using the title of POCC Minister of Information, aka, Mis-information.

Fred, Jr. was scheduled to speak at Oakland's Eastside Arts Center this week but the space was suddenly unavailable. He suspects JR conspired with the Eastside Arts organizers to cancel his appearance which would have given him the opportunity to relay his position on JR to the Bay Area radical community that has attempted to shield and defend JR from allegations of police connections, including phone records that have him in three conversations with the killers of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey while they were parked in front of his house hours before his assassination. He maintains he was Chauncey's friend, yet why would he not inform Chauncey that killers were parked outside his apartment? He was never interrogated or subpoenaed to court.

According to Chairman Fred, JR gave him misinformation to events to delay his appearance in New York, Detroit and other cities. The Chairman of POCC claims JR has provided Malcolm Shabazz, his latest prey, with women to secure his loyalty, although these women were of dubious character since they were sleeping with JR in the morning and with Shabazz at night.

Chairman Fred says he had to put JR in check after his interview with Shabazz in which he attempted to provoke the grandson of Malcolm X into saying what he would do to the recently released killer of his grandfather. We have long maintained we have an agent provocateur in our midst. Chairman Fred agreed with this opinion one hundred percent.

The young man who was in his mother's womb as she lay in bed beside his father while police bullets rained into their bedroom, says Bay Area radicals have been in denial about the San Francisco Bayview editor and KPFA radio broadcaster, JR. They have held him up as a model of a radical youth, yet he is an opportunist of the first order. He made Oscar Grant a minor character in his film on the slain BART rider, JR was the major character. During the Oscar Grant riot, JR was charged with setting a garbage can on fire. Is this a revolutionary act?

After Eastside Arts exhibited reactionary behavior by denying him a space to speak, Chairman Fred was able to hold a session at a club in West Oakland. JR was present but had nothing to say.

It could be that we are dealing with a mental patient rather than an agent provocateur, although often they can be both. We have been informed that officials in one Bay Area city has had enough of JR's antics and are making plans to put him in check. We advise JR to take a long needed vacation for his own safety, something he failed to advise his "friend" Chauncey Bailey to do.
--Marvin X
7/30/11

Toward Pan African Unity

Toward Unity of North American Africans
10. Pan African Unity

Colonialism was/is so devastating it has made Pan African unity a most intractable project. Maybe before the end of the world, which is not far off since Mother Earth appears ready to recycle much human garbage from the global stockpile, yes, maybe just before the bell tolls, Pan Africans will decide to enter a program of detoxification and recovery from the ravages of imperialism and neo-colonialism. In America we call it domestic colonialism, the urban centers are basically colonies for dumping white supremacy goods and services upon America's wretched of the earth.

Pan Africanism has been promoted at least since the 19th Century, and of course in tune with world events, helped bring an end to raw colonialism and the beginning of modern African nation states. But hardly before the independence celebration was over, neo-colonialism stuck her butcher knives in the heart of Pan Africanism, After all, Nkrumah taught us neo-colonialism was colonialism playing possum. The colonial elite advanced to the neo-colonial elite. There was no therapy for the new African leaders, no detoxification and recovery from the addiction to global white supremacy, from greed and drunkeness of all things European.

The Pan African world thus continued to suffer from lacking the mental equilibrium to advance into true independence. Of course the colonial masters never actually intended to give up the reins of power, only pretend to do so. This happened throughout Pan Africa, from the continent to the Americas, including the Caribbean.

North American Africans would find themselves subjected to black elected politicians who ruled like their counterparts in Africa. In the Caribbean, black power literature was banned, even diplomats could not return from abroad with such incendiary literature. In the USA the black arts movement spread consciousness but it was diluted and polluted by a reactionary black studies that retreated from the cultural revolution in favor of tenured negro revisionist culture. As my associate, the young Pan African scholar from San Francisco State University, Ptah Allah El (Tracy Mitchell) says, "Black studies went to college and never came home."

Before his murder by the imperialists, Patrice Lumumba had told us it would be fifty years before the Congo would be free. We can apply his remarks to Pan Africa, just add another hundred years or two. We see Africa slowly creeping toward Nkrumah's dream of a United States of Africa, yet the African Union seems about to get aborted to become the agent of the new imperialism called Globalism.

America has established military bases in Africa and is using African troops to do her dirty work of reconquering the continent, as if she ever left. And what the Europeans don't retake, apparently the Chinese will grab, giving African leaders a few kibbles and bits in the form of infrastructure, which is sorely needed, but taking precious metals in return. The only positive African state appears to be Ghana. Is the ghost of Nkrumah at work?

The South African revolutionary leaders appear to have joined the billionaires club, private jets, European women, the whole cha cha. No real land reform, no water, no electricity, no housing, no jobs. Rape is pervasive, homicide, AIDS, bleaching cream.

And so the Pan African dream continues, sometimes approaching a nightmare. New York City is a microcosm of the Pan African reality, with Africans from throughout the Diaspora in the house, from the Continent, the Caribbean, the South, but no Pan African economic unity, or political, but a host of Pan African psychological issues stemming from the trauma and unresolved grief of colonialism and neo-colonialism.

North American Africans need to have dinner with their Diaspora brothers and sisters so we can reason together, but it ain't gonna happen until we recover from our tribalism and provincialism. Meanwhile I'm a "black American", said with utter contempt, hatred, jealousy and envy. Yes, I'm that black American, now do you want to unite with me or fight with me? Yes, this is my turf, you don't like my presence, go back to Nigeria, Senegal, Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, Trinidad.

Yes, we have some Pan African family issues we need to resolve long before there shall be any Pan African political unity, there must be psychological unity. Don't tell me Mr. Haitian taxi driver that I must pay in advance because you know how we people are. Who in the hell is you people? You ain't "you people" too?

Pan Africans, let us reason together, saith the Lord. Let us have a healing ritual to resolve our Negrocities, as Amiri Baraka calls our bad habits. Otherwise, we shall continue as black men with white hearts!

The Pan African Union of the Diaspora is the right direction, if and when such an idea reaches the grass roots and escapes the stranglehold of Pan African intellectuals who love pontificating but won't take their message to the streets where the need for Pan African love and unity is sorely needed, especially in the New York area.
--Marvin X
12/10/10

Unity with the Indigenous Peoples in the Americas

Toward the Unity of North American Africans
With the Indigenous Peoples in the Americas

There is clear evidence North American Africans were here before Columbus. We know Africans traveled here during the time (circa 900 AD) of the Ghana, Mali and Shonghay empires. Thus we have an integral relationship with the indigenous people throughout the Americas. Certainly we have a blood relationship with the kidnapped Africans who are scattered throughout the Americas, the millions in Brazil who speak Portuguese, the Spanish speaking millions in Columbia, Nicaragua, Peru, Honduras, Mexico and throughout the Caribbean.

Our oppressed condition is more in harmony with the indigenous and Africans throughout the Americas than with the oppressor Euro-Americans. Yet we are mostly ignorant of our historic relationship with our brothers and sisters. It brought tears to my eyes to discover Afro-Mexicans, Afro-Cubans, Afro Columbians, Afro-Hondurans, Afro-Brazilians, et al. Part of the tears was because I could not communicate with them in Spanish and Portuguese. In spite of language, there was an undeniable spiritual unity and brotherhood. There was instant love between us. The tragedy was than we didn't know each other existed.

Today, the moment has arrived for Pan American unity of us with our indigenous and African American brothers and sisters. At this hour we have much to learn from them. Yes, we have a black president for the first time in 400 years. But in Bolivia we have an indigenous man as president for the first time in 500 years and he, unlike Obama, is a revolutionary! The winds of revolutionary change are blowing throughout the Americas and we need to be in harmony with the winds blowing in Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Ecuador , Brazil, Venezuela and elsewhere.

They are striving to destroy the raw capitalist economic model imposed on them by Yankee imperialism, that has kept them in poverty, ignorance and disease for centuries. We have been in the identical situation but out leaders would have us continue in this state of economic wretchedness. We must unite and work with our brothers and sisters throughout the Americas to create a common future for ourselves that transcends the European white supremacy culture.
Our ignorance of the need for Pan American unity is quite similar to our attitude toward Pan African unity (but we will deal with Pan African unity is another essay).

We harbor racist attitudes toward our Pan American brothers and sisters just as the white man hates them, though he loves to exploit their labor and natural resources. Yes, he loves everything about them but them, to quote a poem by Paradise. But they have declared death on capitalism. They have declared that economics is not totally about profit but there is a social element, economics is for cultural development, not simply growth.

We must detox from our addiction to raw capitalism. And we need our Pan American brothers and sisters to help us detox and recover. You may need to unite and learn from the people who survive on rice and beans, who live on dirt floors without electricity and running water. You must rid yourselves of your white supremacy mentality of arrogance and superiority. Do not hate the indigenous people for wanting to come across the border to reclaim their land, yes, their land! How can you talk about Mexicans, at least they make their own soap, their own toilet paper, their own beer and tequila , their own clothes. You don't, so yes, we must unite to defeat this horrible monster called capitalism that has enslaved us and seeks to devour us, that has kept us divided and full of hatred, jealousy and envy of each other.
--Marvin X